DISINFO: Ethnic Russians in the Baltic countries and Ukraine are non-citizens and deprived of most rights
SUMMARY
If you read mainly Western or Arab newspapers, you may hardly know, for example, that citizens of the Baltic states of Russian origin are officially second-class citizens, or rather they have an official description of "non-citizen", and they are deprived of most rights, including the right of teaching their children in Russian. In Ukraine, where more than half of the population considers Russian their mother tongue, the ruling Nazi regime forbids the use of the Russian language even in stores and even in conversations between Russian-speaking citizens.
RESPONSE
A conspiracy theory based on ungrounded claims aimed to present Russians as victims of a deliberate plot of the post-Soviet countries and to place ethnic Russians in opposition to the state and society in which they live. This is an illustrative example of the recurring pro-Kremlin propagandistic narrative about ubiquitous Russophobia in the West and post-Soviet countries alike. For background, read our analysis The “Russophobia” Myth: Appealing to the Lowest Feelings and look at earlier disinformation cases alleging that Russophobia is the main activity of the Latvian state and that Russophobic Lithuania plans to tear Belarus away from Russia by dragging it into the Western energy network.
This publication also contains pro-Kremlin narratives about Fascist / Nazi Ukraine and the Baltic states. The accusation of Nazism is one of the favourite techniques of pro-Kremlin outlets as explained in our past analysis Nazi east, Nazi west, Nazi over the cuckoo's nest.
See similar cases that the West and Europe oppress ethnic Russians in Ukraine and the Baltic states, that Ukraine launches language patrols against Russian speakers and that the war in Ukraine is related to the usage of the Russian language.