DISINFO: Europeans are victims of a series of Anglo-Saxon provocations against Putin and Russia
DISINFORMATION CASE DETAILS

DISINFO: Europeans are victims of a series of Anglo-Saxon provocations against Putin and Russia

SUMMARY

Europe’s weakness is very obvious in its relations with Russia. If the EU wants to become stronger and turn into an independent actor, it needs to build normal relations with Russia. If it is fine being a young partner in the Atlantic project, it needs to do nothing. The outright majority of Europeans stand for normal relations with Russia, but the EU ruling establishment does not. If the residents of “European house” are unable to independently build relations with Russia, then maybe the house does not really belong to them. Possibly someone is gathering them in that house in order to shut the door and burn the house down at some moment in time.

Following Ukraine’s violent turn to the West in 2014, the EU fell into the trap and could not get out of it. The EU can neither take Ukraine in nor recognise it as a part of the Russian world. Neither the Germans nor the French benefit from playing out the Ukrainian card; the Anglo-Saxons do. They were pushing the topic of Russian interference into European affairs, demonised Russia as a whole and Vladimir Putin as the so-called Skripals’ poisoner. Lately, Navalny is used as yet another factor of the anti-EU game.

European leaders are well aware of the reality of the Navalny’s trap. As in Ukrainian history, Europeans will have two actors in the Anglo-Saxon play called “Let’s isolate Russia.” Josep Borrell tries to explain to the Anglo-Saxons and radical European Atlantists that the EU has the right to determine its own future and to speak with Russia. By delaying the normalisation of relations with Russia, the EU is only becoming weaker.

RESPONSE

This is a mix of recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narratives about lost sovereignty/external control, Western Russophobia and anti-Russian activities, and conspiracies about the poisoning of Alexei Navalny and the Skripals. In the pro-Kremlin media, the term “Anglo-Saxons” means “evil”, “belligerent” and “morally corrupt” Westerners, as explained in our earlier analysis.

Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a military grade Novichok-type nerve agent during his trip in Siberia in August 2020. He was hospitalised and treated at the Charite Hospital in Berlin. In October 2o20, the EU sanctioned 6 individuals and one entity involved in the assassination attempt. To obfuscate responsibility for the poisoning, the pro-Kremlin media has drawn numerous parallels between the Navalny and Skripal poisonings. Most of them were coupled with the usual denials: “there is no evidence that Navalny was poisoned” or that “London has no evidence of Moscow’s complicity in the Skripals’ poisoning”. Read more about this in our past analysis titled Salisbury all over again.

The US does not control the EU. The EU Member States are sovereign countries and make sovereign decisions about their own security and foreign policies, including relations with Russia. The US is an important ally to the EU but EU policy is not determined by the US. The decisions in the EU are made by the directly elected European Parliament, the European Commission together with the European Council (the governments of the 27 EU countries).

Last but not least, the 2014 events in Ukraine were not a violent Anglo-Saxon provocation in order to harden EU-Russia relations, as implicitly follows from the article, but the outcome of the Ukrainian people's frustration with former President Yanukovych's last-minute U-turn when, after seven years of negotiation, he refused to sign the EU–Ukraine Association Agreement and halted progress towards Ukraine's closer relationship with the EU.

See earlier disinformation cases alleging that poisoning of Navalny is a provocation to spoil relations between Russia and Germany, that it is unclear, who really poisoned Sergei and Yuliya Skripal, that the Anglo-Saxons rule America “from abroad” and are now trying to control Russia, that Anglo-Saxons are at the edge of anti-Russian attack, and that Anglo-Saxons tried to control China by cancelling globalisation.

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Disclaimer

Cases in the EUvsDisinfo database focus on messages in the international information space that are identified as providing a partial, distorted, or false depiction of reality and spread key pro-Kremlin messages. This does not necessarily imply, however, that a given outlet is linked to the Kremlin or editorially pro-Kremlin, or that it has intentionally sought to disinform. EUvsDisinfo publications do not represent an official EU position, as the information and opinions expressed are based on media reporting and analysis of the East Stratcom Task Force.

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