Moscow Offering Two Messages On Ukraine, Neither Of Which Should Be Accepted – OpEd

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Vladimir Putin’s agitprop now offers two different versions of the war against Ukraine, one “for the unconditionally dense and a second for the nominally intelligence.” The first is delivered to the mass Russian television audience; the second “to the Western public and intelligentsia within the country,” Igor Eidman says.

The Russian sociologist and Deutsche Welle commentator says “the mass version is trivial: ‘the Banderite junta is guilty of everything, and ‘we aren’t there.’ The elite variant is more complex: both sides are guilty” in all aspects of the conflict (facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2141536735909294&id=100001589654713).

The latter version is disseminated by independent media. It is “willingly bought by the Russian ‘liberal’ public and Putin enthusiasts in the West. It penetrates even official declarations of the authorities of European countries,” Eidmann continues, who are prepared to pick up this version because it is supposedly balanced and thus objective.

The shameful evilness of this is “of course, unheard of.” Those who buy into it are prepared to condemn the victim of violence for attempting to resist; and those who bleat that “’all are guilty’” are in fact insisting that “no one is guilty,” exactly the fallback position that plays to the Kremlin’s advantage.

In this pathetic world, the Ukrainian “butterfly” in attempting to break out of the webs spun by the horrible Russian “spider” sometimes makes mistakes. But the reaction of the other insects (“Russian and European ‘liberals’”) is to insist that Ukraine should “remain calm” and recognize that “it shares with the spider responsibility for the conflict.”

Some are even prepared to blame Ukraine for getting trapped in this web in the first place. Vladimir Putin and his propagandists could not hope for anything more.

Paul Goble

Paul Goble is a longtime specialist on ethnic and religious questions in Eurasia. Most recently, he was director of research and publications at the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy. Earlier, he served as vice dean for the social sciences and humanities at Audentes University in Tallinn and a senior research associate at the EuroCollege of the University of Tartu in Estonia. He has served in various capacities in the U.S. State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the International Broadcasting Bureau as well as at the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Mr. Goble maintains the Window on Eurasia blog and can be contacted directly at [email protected] .

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