Russian disinformation campaign to soften European resistance

Putinists spit on Europe, calling it “Гейропа” (Gayropa) and are waging a hybrid war against it, even threatening nuclear conflict. However, after Trump initiated negotiations on Ukraine, such rhetoric subsided. Still, this does not reflect a sincere desire for peace. Unlike Trump, Europeans are more unyielding negotiators, so Russia wants to soften them with the narrative that they should not reject it, that “there is no Europe without Russia” and that it is “the largest European country” (although it is 77 percent Asian). Ukraine, according to this narrative, is “defeated” (although the war is not even over, and Putin has not achieved the set goals) and is an “obstacle to peace” between Europeans and Russia, which is also luring them with favorable energy resources

 

Author: Vangel Bashevski 

Pro-Russian propagandists in our country, as well as those in neighboring Serbia, have been spreading hatred towards Europeans for years, even labeling them with mutually exclusive epithets such as: Nazis, homosexuals, and Satanists controlled by the Vatican. The roots of this harmful foreign influence lie in the Kremlin, whose supporters have derogatorily called Europe–“Гейропа” (Gayropa), and Russian politicians and propagandists have openly threatened it with war, even nuclear.

However, after all those death threats, the tone of the (pro-)Russian propagandists magically changed and softened–Europe is no longer “Gayropa,” but is now being called upon to warm relations with Russia. Yet that is not a sincere handshake, but a form of manipulation.

Negotiations on the war in Ukraine are currently underway, initiated by Donald Trump, who is somewhat lenient towards Russia, while the Europeans, who are more intransigent, have also joined in, so Russia’s extended hand to them is just an attempt to soften their resistance and turn them into the European equivalent of Trump. He is presented in this story as a positive example of a pragmatic and constructive politician, whom Europeans should follow.

 

Absurd: Europe should be Russia’s partner, and Russia should be the guarantor of European security

A pro-Russian post says (excerpts):

The EU will remain in bad relations with Russia, and the US will begin to build partnership relations with Russia.

A few years ago, EU leaders allowed the Biden administration to succeed in provoking Putin to attack Ukraine, thereby completely disrupting economic relations on the European continent.

Perhaps it is time for Europeans to change the game. To accept the military defeat in Ukraine with the loss of as little territory as possible and to start warming relations with Russia by quickly lifting sanctions and repairing and putting into operation the gas pipelines from Russia. Perhaps a partnership with Russia is the best security guarantee for the EU.

Another post says something similar:

Without Russia, there is no European security.

Russia has been terrorizing Ukraine since before the EU and Joe Biden existed, so the claim that they provoked it is not true. Proof of this is: Russia’s abuse of the allied Pereiaslav Agreement (1654) with Ukraine, after which it fell under the Russian tsars; the burning of the Ukrainian city of Baturyn (1708) and the liquidation of the Zaporozhian Host (1775); bans on the Ukrainian language such as the Valuev Circular (1863) and the Ems Ukaz (1876); the suppression of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (1918–1922) by Soviet Russia; as well as the Holodomor and the so-called Shooting Revival in the 1930s.

Furthermore, Putin did not attack Ukraine during the Biden administration, but during Barack Obama’s. In February-March 2014, Putin carried out aggression and illegal annexation of Crimea, after which he sent agents like Igor Girkin-Strelkov to tear it away from Ukraine and Donbass.

Thus, on April 7, 2014, the so-called DPR emerged, and five days later, Strelkov and his fighters attacked the city of Slavyansk, starting the Donbas War. Russia’s regular forces were also secretly involved in it, and on February 24, 2022, they launched an open and comprehensive aggression against Ukraine.

That war is not over, Ukraine is not defeated, and Russia has not achieved its stated goals of so-called denazification (taking Kyiv and overthrowing the government there, which the Russians falsely describe as “neo-Nazi”) and so-called demilitarization (the military weakening of Ukraine, which is now even more militarized with modern Western weapons and has even invaded Russia’s Kursk Oblast). Therefore, it is unfounded to demand acceptance of the “defeat of Ukraine.”

Russia became the largest country in the world (i.e. empire) through brutal conquests, so it is not surprising that a bunch of its former possessions, and now neighbors, sought protection from it within NATO: Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland.

Speaking of Finland, it and Sweden abandoned their decades of neutrality and joined NATO precisely because of Russian war crimes and destruction in Ukraine on a scale Europe has not seen since World War II. That is why Europeans are now strengthening their defenses, and some of them are even planning to mine their borders and restore compulsory military service.

Until not so long ago, this was unthinkable, and Europe was moving towards abolishing borders and conscription, towards good-neighborly cooperation, etc., but that changed precisely because of Russia’s aggressiveness, so what kind of “partner” and “guarantor of European security” can it be?

The speaker of the Russian Duma (parliament), Vyacheslav Volodin, has made a threatening statement that the Russian Sarmat missile could reach Strasbourg, where the European Parliament sits, in 3 minutes and 20 seconds, and MP and general Andrey Gurulev said that it would target the Netherlands.

Threats were also made by propagandist Vladimir Solovyov, who owns a villa on Lake Como in Italy, which is now “frozen” by sanctions. However, the most extreme in this threat was his namesake, politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

Let us also recall the threat made in 2018 by the Russian ambassador to the country, Oleg Shcherbak, according to whom we could be a legitimate target of a Russian attack if we join the NATO pact and if it clashes with Russia. Viktor Tatarintsev made a similar threat regarding Sweden’s entry into NATO, where he was ambassador, and Sweden held him accountable for that diplomatic scandal.

Such undiplomatic vocabulary and behavior are unthinkable for Europeans. You will hardly hear such statements, for example, from Emmanuel Macron, even though France is also a nuclear power.

 

Russia between Europe and Asia

Urging Europeans not to reject Russia, the following post about it says:

 

Russia is a country with 11 time zones, it is the largest European country, with the most numerous European people.

However, most of Russia (as much as 77 percent) is located within the borders of Asia, beyond the Ural Mountains and the Ural River, which serve as a natural border with Europe. Russia also has a European part, larger than any other European country, so it is most accurate to say that it is a transcontinental, Eurasian country. According to geographical standards, the largest European country is Ukraine, because with its borders it is a completely European country.

Europe did not reject Russia, it was Russia that rejected Europe, emphasizing that it has its own “special path,” which has nothing to do with the European one. Instead of with the Europeans, it builds close relations with aggressive and repressive regimes such as those in North Korea, Iran, Taliban Afghanistan, etc.

 

No Europe without Russia?

One post says the following:

The old European illusion of a “new Europe without Russia” is dead.

The post seems to say that “There is no Europe without Russia”—as a famous political saying goes—but that illusion is dead, long ago. It is the idea of ​​a united Europe “from Gibraltar to the Urals” or “from the Atlantic to the Urals”—as these variations on the theme go.

A proponent of this was Charles de Gaulle, who in 1966 even distanced France from NATO and tried to warm relations with the USSR, which at that time included Russia, which he respected very much. In Moscow, he was welcomed as a hero and signed cooperation agreements with it, but its aggression against Czechoslovakia in 1968 shattered those illusions.

There was a return to them after the democratization of the USSR under Mikhail Gorbachev at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, while post-Soviet Russia under Boris Yeltsin then cooperated with the EU, as well as under Putin in his early and more moderate ruling phase. There were ideas for Russia to join the EU, and even NATO.

However, this did not come to fruition due to resistance among some Euro-Atlantic members or within Russia itself, and over time, resentment grew within it towards the West, due to its military interventions such as the one in Serbia, its support for so-called color revolutions, and due to NATO’s expansion into the post-Soviet space.

Here one gets the impression that the West has wronged the Russians by not reaching out to them, but one must look at the bigger picture. First of all, when the Russians opened up to the West, they were defeated enemies from the Cold War, so it could not treat them as equal partners.

Their totalitarian communist ideology ended up in the dustbin of history, the USSR ingloriously collapsed and all its crimes, repressions, and manipulations came to light, from which all of Eastern Europe, but also other parts of the world, suffered, and the planned economy there collapsed and a difficult and criminal transition began. Russia at that time even received food aid from the United States, as if it were a Third World country.

While in 1992 Europe was uniting and celebrating, Russia was involved in the war in Transnistria (against Moldova), as well as in Abkhazia and South Ossetia (against Georgia), but there were conflicts even in Moscow such as the August Coup in 1991 and the Constitutional Crisis in the fall of 1993, which was followed by the First Chechen War (1994–1996), and then the Second (1999–2000).

Russia was too chaotic to be taken seriously and to enter European society. Its neighbors, who had previously suffered under it, were seen as victims (the Baltic states, Poland, etc.) and were somewhat better off than it, and therefore more acceptable to the West.

Of course, to enter that society they implemented reforms, which they handled more successfully than Russia, and even though Russia also implemented some, they were not enforced properly. They did not even conduct lustration, so now they have a president—a former agent of the repressive Soviet secret service, the KGB.

In the fall of 2003, Russia nearly provoked war with Ukraine with a brief usurpation of the island of Tuzla near Crimea, and in August 2008, it again attacked Georgia in favor of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The culmination of such behavior was the invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022.

In parallel, Russia is waging a hybrid war against Europe, contaminating its media space with disinformation, adversely influencing its elections, and shooting or poisoning dissidents who have fled Russia, and even planting bombs in military warehouses across Europe.

How does such a Russia fit into the idea of ​​Europe as a family of peaceful, prosperous, cooperative, free, and secure countries?

Pro-Russian propagandists have no answer to this, they can only lure Europeans with Russian energy resources, as if they were bribing them with a can of gasoline.

 

 

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