The West’s maniacal desire to impose sanctions on Russia is explained by the mere fact of Russia’s existence. The reason for these restrictive measures is that Moscow is protecting its national interests.
The US and its allies are preparing a large-scale disinformation campaign targeting Russia's Sputnik V vaccine.
The campaign is a coordinated effort involving USAID, George Soros's Open Society Foundations, the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the BBC, and the Reuters agency, and seeks to belittle Russia's achievements in the global fight against COVID-19. Among other things, the provocation will involve fake video footage of mass fatalities allegedly caused by Sputnik V.
The report advances recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative of being 'encircled', 'under attack' casting Western actors as inherently biased against Russia; Western media as subservient to their respective governments; and Russia as a constant target of foreign "provocations."
Made without evidence, the assertion can be dismissed.
Russian officials and state media routinely prophesy oddly specific Western "provocations" against Russia which, for reasons unknown, never come to fruition. In 2019 alone, pro-Kremlin outlets said that NATO would kill its own officers to provoke a new conflict in Ukraine; that the UK would use its chemical labs to kill even more Russians; that the US was planning an anti-Russian operation in the Black Sea; that Canada was also planning an anti-Russian operation in the Black Sea; that NATO would intervene in Crimea to rig the Ukrainian presidential election.
In 2020, the "provocation" trope was used to explain away the arrest of Russian mercenaries in Belarus, the Moscow-sanctioned poisoning of Alexei Navalny, and the downing of MH17.
The specific allegation that Western actors fabricate video footage in the course of media "campaigns" against Russia and its allies is also seen in pro-Kremlin coverage of the Syrian civil war. In this context, chemical attacks known to have been perpetrated by the Assad regime are dismissed as "false-flag" operations by the White Helmets, Western governments, or Western-sponsored "terrorists."
See here for our explainer on the importance of paranoia in disinformation.