‘A Surge of Insane Russian Propaganda’
‘A Surge of Insane Russian Propaganda’
Moscow is playing nuclear roulette again.
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It’s been a dangerously nutty few days in Russia.
On Saturday, the country’s defense ministry accused Ukraine of planning an attack on a nuclear power plant in Russia’s Kursk region, near the northeastern border of Ukraine, news outlets reported, as well as on the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Enerhodar, Ukraine. The plot supposedly involves Kyiv hitting the plants with dirty bombs and then attributing the attacks to Moscow as a kind of “provocation” — aka Russia has concocted an excuse to escalate the war because, hey, it was Kyiv’s fault, right?
On Friday, Andrii Kovalenko, the head of the counter-disinformation department at Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, wrote on Telegram that Russia “may be preparing a nuclear provocation.”
Russia’s Ministry of Defense threatened to “immediately take tough retaliatory military and military-technical measures” if such an attack is carried out, The Kyiv Independent reported. The Ukrainian government adamantly denied the Russian assertion.
These dangerous claims are merely part of “a surge of insane Russian propaganda,” Heorhii Tykhyi, the spokesman for Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry, said on Telegram.
One such absurd piece of this current wave of propaganda was aired on Russian state TV on Sunday, when a so-called military expert — and former government advisor — said Ukraine is allegedly planning to strike the Kursk and/or Zaporizhzhia plants “because they received an order from the West to establish the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race,” according to a Ukrainian journalist who reviewed an assortment of such propaganda.
Instead of getting into the craziness that is the history of this assertion, consider what this Ukrainian journalist said to me today of the Russians: “The stuff they talk is completely bananas. I think if they said this shit somewhere in the West, they’d be put into a mental hospital.” (This stuff is, of course, decidedly unlike our U.S. brand of bananas political statements that would most certainly land the speakers in treatment…)
On Thursday, Ukrainian soldiers seized full control of Sudzha, the administrative center for the Kursk region. It was the first time foreign troops have invaded and held Russian territory since Nazi Germany did in World War II, The Associated Press reported. The Kursk plant is an hour or so north of Sudzha.
In both 2022 and 2023, Russia alleged that Ukraine was planning the same kind of false-flag attack on the Zaporizhzhia plant, which has been occupied since 2022.
On August 11, Ukrainian officials reported that the Russian military had set fire to “a large number of automobile tires in cooling towers” at the Zaporizhzhia plant. “Perhaps this is a provocation or an attempt to create panic in the settlements on the right bank of the former reservoir,” wrote Yevhen Yevtushenko, the head of the military administration in Nikopol, across the river from Enerhodar, on Telegram.
Keeping a calm head in the face of such attempts to whip up panic seems to be the name of the game in the region these days.
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Here is my only comment. Do the Russian people really believe the propaganda? I am assuming so, given how many of our fellow citizens believe the MAGA torrent of lies.