Many things about living in Russia are great. Russians have fantastic stories to tell and the places they tell them are often incredible to travel to. But the beat-down from government propaganda is awful. The trolls are unrelenting and the lies spun from the top are depressing to hear over and over again. Take this week’s huge story about the Belarusian opposition figure and journalist Roman Protasevich. Belarus’s government concocted a fake bomb threat and then sent up a fighter jet to ensure the plane diverted from its intended destination in Lithuania and landed in Minsk, where the 26 year old was promptly detained and tortured. Russia likely didn’t play a role in devising or executing the plot – but their state media has jumped in mightily to defend it.
To listen to the likes of RT and other Kremlin mouthpieces, you’d think Belarus’s government was justified in doing all this because the young man was a “Nazi.” A B.S claim made because photos of him wearing the uniform of a right wing Ukrainian militia surfaced. His family says he was embedded with the Azov Battalion on an assignment almost seven years ago. There is no evidence he has ever held neo-Nazi views; has never spoken favourably about the far-right; nor has ever had any association with anyone in a leadership position or otherwise. There is every reason to believe his family and friends – and zero reason to believe the Kremlin narrative.
Rule #1 of Russian propaganda: if something is indefensible, smear the victim. They did it with Alexey Navalny (also with alleged right wing associations) and are going it again here. Rule #2: find a false equivalent and complain about a western double standard. (In this case, that the US asked European nations to deny airspace entry to a private jet carrying Bolivia’s leader in 2013 so that the plane could be checked to see if Edward Snowden was on board.) And Rule #3: if all that fails, claim the incident isn’t that important anyway.
Historian Sergey Radchenko, who I have never personally met, posted a smart twitter thread on this topic. To quote him…
) are Navalny and Protasevich being persecuted for their alleged rightist transgressions? The answer is obviously not: both are being persecuted for their opposition to the regimes of Putin and Lukashenko.
) Would they still have been unjustly persecuted if they did not hold these alleged views. The answer is yes because they are being persecuted for other reasons.
) Does the discussion of their alleged views objectively distract attention from their unjust persecution? Yes.
So don’t fall for it: let both men (Navalny and Protasevich) out of jail, then discuss the far right allegations. To do anything else, is to fall into a Kremlin propaganda trap.