Brat brata bje, shchob chuzhyj bojavsja
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From: Pavlo Ivanchenko <[email protected]>
To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, March 4, 2014 7:05 AM
Subject: Re: [politics] Putin's Crimea Propaganda Machine - Daily Beast - 4Mar2014
Russian consul general Vyacheslav Svetlichnyi
Question: why so many Ukrainian sounding names among Russian diplomatic and government staff?
PI
On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 12:14 AM, Stefan Lemieszewski <[email protected]> wrote:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/03/putin-s-crimea-propaganda-machine.html
>Daily Beast
>4Mar2014
>Putin’s Crimea Propaganda Machine
>
>
>To justify its invasion of Crimea, the
Kremlin and state-run media went into full fabrication mode this weekend. Here
are the lies that Russia is telling its viewers back home.
>Russia invaded Ukraine over the weekend, justifying its incursion by claiming
it needed to protect Crimea’s ethnic Russian population from supposed neo-Nazi
extremists. This was pure propaganda, of course—Vladmir Putin has been
keen to annex land that used to be part of Russia, as he did in Georgia in 2008,
and seems to think that the Ukrainian army will and should immediately surrender
to the Russian one.
>Still, Putin needed a story to spin, no matter how full of holes, and thus
the neo-Nazi claims. But as it turns out, Crimea’s streets are not exactly paved
with extremists—a fact that has proven troublesome for Russian state TV channels
looking to find token far-right bogeymen. They’ve had to resort to tricks to get
the right characters for Russian audiences—making much, for instance, of Sachko
Bilyi, a buffoon who visited a local parliament with his AK-47 machine gun. No
one in Ukraine thinks much of Bilyi, other than that he’s a clown, but Russian
TV is now claiming that squads made up of thousands of Bilyis are terrorizing
Ukraine’s civilians and intimidating MPs.
>The Russian media also reported on “skirmishes” on the streets of Crimea and
showed a video about “extremists in Crimea attacking Russian soldiers.” As it
turns out, the video was actually made on February 20, when close to 100
protesters, aid workers and journalists were shot by snipers in Kiev. That day,
several cameramen filmed the terror on location—one of them standing nearby for
a very long time. When his video surfaced on Russian TV, purporting to be from
Crimea, it made many suspect that the cameraman was from Russia and that Russian
journalists may have had an arrangement with the snipers so that they wouldn’t
draw fire.
>For additional help manufacturing scenes of outrage, Russian provocateurs in
Simferopol organized a nice mise-en-scene for Putin’s propaganda machine. A bus
filled with people dressed like paramiliatry fighters, toting
machine guns and grenade launchers, were filmed by Russian journliasts. It
appeared instantly on the Internet and Russian TV channels, labeled as “The Right
Sector from the Western Ukraine attacking peaceful Russian citizens and killing
soldiers in Crimea.” But if one looks closely, it is possible to make out
several important details: the bus from ‘the Western Ukraine’ in fact has a
Crimean license plate number, and the fighters are armed with GM-94 grenade
launchers and AK-100 machine guns, which are only used by Russian soldiers.
Another question: how did Right Sector extremists manage to get to Simferopol on
a big bus after all the roads to Crimea were blocked three days ago by armed
police and Russian soldiers? Several jounralists tried to pass through the
cordons, but in vain. Apparently only armed fighters and extremists can get
permission to go to Crimea. Later, Russian consul general Vyacheslav Svetlichnyi dismissed reports of casulaties amongst Russian citizens
and soldiers in Crimea as mere rumor.
>Then there was the story about how a local state administration in Kharkiv
hoisted a Russian flag instead of a Ukrainian one on the local parliamentary
building. The rumor went viral thanks to a 25-year-old blogger in Moscow, nicknamed Mika
Ronkainen. “Right now! Kharkiv administration was set free and the Russian flag
was hoisted. Guess by whom?” he wrote on his social network
account. Later, journalists established that Ronkainen likes to be
photographed in Nazi uniforms and takes part in the Putin-supported Russian xenophobic movement “Locals”. Apparently the real story was that several buses of Russian “tourists” were
taken to Kharkiv to imitate local populations showing enthusiastic support for
Russia. They not only hoisted Russian flags, but reportedly beat Ukrainians who
expressed indignation at Russian aggression in Crimea.
>Lines and crowds at border checkpoints are very hard to fake,
so Russian TV instead filmed the line next to the border checkpoint with Poland,
labeling it as “thousands of Ukrainains running away to Russia from the far
right.”
>Among the other potent, but false, myths of the Putin propaganda machine:
that panicked Ukrainians are fleeing en masse to Russia to escape the new
government in Kiev, and that the Ukrainian army is unfit for combat and soldiers are defecting to the Russian side.
>As for the former, lines and crowds at border checkpoints are very hard to
fake, so Russian TV instead filmed the line next to the border checkpoint with
Poland, labeling it as “thousands of Ukrainains running away to Russia from the
far right.” (Ukrainian journalists figured out the real location by noticing
that a plate on the checkpoint listed the name of the city of Shegyni, which is
on the Polish border.)
>And as for the Moscow propagandist rumor that Ukrainian soldiers are
clamoring to become Russian citizens, the only ones who seem eager to join
Russia’s side are the Berkut riot policement, the ones allegedly involved in the
mass murder of protesters in Kiev. Russian citizenship for them is the only hope
for salvation from criminal prosecution and prison. Meanwhile, even as the
Russian media is reporting that “Ukrainian soldiers went over to the Crimean
authorities’ side peacefully and without any shots fired…the majority of them
will swear allegiance to local authorities,” in the Ukrainian media, one in fact
discovers that several Crimean regiments were approached by the Russian army and
that they refused to lay down arms.
>No one in Ukraine or in the West doubts that the Russian invasion was
provoked by anything other than Putin’s desire to reestablish the USSR 2.0. But
every invader wants to look like a liberator, and in order to do so, Putin needs
his scary extremists, his scared Ukrainians and his Crimean soldiers welcoming
him with open arms. Meanwhile, the question now is: what will Putin do with his
army in Ukraine? We can only hope the Russians shoot down their own myths and
delusions, and not the local population.
>=========
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