Vladimir Putin’s agitprop now offers two different versions of the war against Ukraine, one “for the unconditionally dense and a second for the nominally intelligent.” The first is delivered to the mass Russian television audience; the second “to the Western public and intelligentsia within the country,” Igor Eidman says.
The Russian sociologist and Deutsche Welle commentator says “the mass version is trivial: ‘the Banderite junta is guilty of everything, and ‘we [Russians] aren’t there.’ The elite variant is more complex: both sides are guilty” in all aspects of the conflict.
The latter version is disseminated by independent media. It is “willingly bought by the Russian ‘liberal’ public and Putin enthusiasts in the West. It penetrates even official declarations of the authorities of European countries,” Eidman continues, who are prepared to pick up this version because it is supposedly balanced and thus objective.
The shameful evilness of this is “of course, unheard of.” Those who buy into it are prepared to condemn the victim of violence for attempting to resist; and those who bleat that “’all are guilty’” are in fact insisting that “no one is guilty,” exactly the fallback position that plays to the Kremlin’s advantage.
In this pathetic world, the Ukrainian “butterfly” in attempting to break out of the webs spun by the horrible Russian “spider” sometimes makes mistakes. But the reaction of the other insects (“Russian and European ‘liberals’”) is to insist that Ukraine should “remain calm” and recognize that “it shares with the spider responsibility for the conflict.”
Some are even prepared to blame Ukraine for getting trapped in this web in the first place. Vladimir Putin and his propagandists could not hope for anything more.
Further Reading:
- Seven commandments of fake news: New York Times exposes Kremlin’s methods
- How we defend ourselves against the disinformation virus: NYT series final episode
- Condemnation and “concerns”: world reaction to Russia’s attack on Ukrainian ships
- Russian wave of disinformation from the Azov Sea
- Fight against disinformation is also a fight for independent media, Novaya Gazeta case shows
- To deal with Putin, West needs to study Russian criminal world, Eidman says
