For the Kremlin, the UNGA is a place to unleash a torrent of falsehoods on a broad range of topics, instead of engaging in serious multilateral diplomacy.
On the home front, however, the Kremlin’s disinformation peddlers are far more comfortable to launder more narrowly focused narratives. Re-drawing faux red lines, rattling Russia’s nuclear arsenal, issuing pompous threats and dismissing peace was all a day’s work for Putin’s little helpers.
This time we mean it
For some weeks now, the Kremlin’s disinformation outlets have been reinforcing Putin’s fumbling and thinly veiled threats of asymmetric Russian retaliation should the West lift the restrictions on Ukraine to use Western-supplied weapons to strike military targets deep inside Russia. When the master tries to draw another questionable red line, the pro-Kremlin sycophants are sure to amplify it.
On 19 September, the European Parliament passed a resolution calling for lifting restrictions on Ukraine to strike legitimate military targets inside Russia. And the Kremlin’s mouthpieces went into overdrive. The notorious pro-Kremlin Pravda outlets, part of the Russian propaganda network Portal Kombat, immediately (and falsely) accused the European Union of declaring war on Russia, while Russian state-run TV Channel 1 added the ‘Russophobia’ treatment.
3 minutes and 20 seconds
Others were not quite so subtle. The notorious Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyov was all too keen to echo the fear-mongering of another odious character – the Chairman of the State Duma Vyacheslav Volodin, who boasted that Russian Sarmat missiles could reach the European Parliament in 3 minutes and 20 seconds. While this may sound merely boastful, these kinds of publicised discussions on the potential damage Russian missiles could inflict on Europe also serve the purpose of reinforcing the faux red lines drawn by Putin.
It also facilitates another of the Kremlin’s favourite disinformation tropes – juxtaposing the political leadership in the West with the ‘ordinary people’. The manipulative, wedge-driving implication is that the leadership, or ‘the elites’ in the Kremlin’s parlance, make reckless, selfish decisions, putting people in harm’s way. The Kremlin has been exploiting this ‘global elites’ avenue for years to peddle baseless conspiracy theories and erode public trust in legitimate governments.
Always play the nuclear card
Russia has many horrendous weapons in its arsenal, as Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine has painfully illustrated. Yet, choosing the Sarmat missile to issue threats to the EU is not an accident. This is a long-range nuclear capable ballistic missile. Choosing this specific weapon, even if recent Sarmat launch tests have failed, is yet another way for the Kremlin to rattle its nuclear sabre.
We’ve logged hundreds of cases in our database of the Kremlin playing the nuclear card time and again. The same pattern tends to repeat: Putin issues a thinly veiled threat – we will take appropriate measures; political lackeys like Volodin add specificity – Sarmat missiles can reach Strasbourg in 3 minutes 20 seconds; and finally, propagandists like Solovyov shout about it from the rooftops. Et voila! A new ‘red line’ is drawn.
Peace on the menu again
Accusing Europe of declaring war on Russia should go hand-in-glove with depicting the Kremlin as a paragon of peace, right? At least that is the usual pro-Kremlin line. Good and kindly Russia wants peace, but the evil and greedy West wants to keep fighting. Well, this week it got a little more uncomfortable for Moscow.
The Kremlin’s sincerity for peace has always been highly questionable. The Kremlin could maintain the appearance of wanting peace and blame Ukraine for undermining peace efforts while it knew that Russia won’t have to actually engage in a meaningful process for a just and lasting peace.
Time to backpedal
But then, already soon after the Summit on Peace in Ukraine held in Switzerland in June, Ukraine shifted gears, opening up to the idea of inviting Russia to the next such Summit. At the time, the Kremlin merely brushed this aside to focus on its ongoing attempts to undermine Ukraine’s efforts for peace. Now, in the context of UNGA, just and lasting peace in Ukraine is once again on the agenda, and the idea of holding a second Summit is taking shape.
And so, the Kremlin’s disinformation launderers have found themselves in the awkward position to have to backpedal once again. After months of claiming that there are no peace negotiations without Russia at the table, now the Kremlin dismissed the possibility of taking part in a peace summit. Instead, it turned back to accusing Ukraine of rejecting peace, dismissing the potential Summit as an Anglo-Saxon ploy to deceive Russia and questioning the legitimacy of the Ukrainian government. Incidentally, the Kremlin was spreading the same disinformation narratives ahead of the Bürgenstock Summit in June. To obfuscate even more, pro-Kremlin outlets regurgitated the old and still false claim of the ‘West torpedoing the Istanbul March 2022 peace talks’.
When it comes to peace, the Kremlin, unlike Ukraine, may talk the talk, but evidently is not ready to walk the walk.
The bogeyman of ‘Ukrainian terrorism’
In the Kremlin’s twisted worldview, Ukraine is portrayed as a terrorist state and one does not negotiate with terrorists. In another attempt to dismiss the idea of negotiating peace, some pro-Kremlin pundits even tried to hijack the breaking news story of the exploding pager attack in Lebanon to link it to Ukraine claiming it will likely acquire similar capabilities to target Russia. The pro-Kremlin logic was that if Israel has such capability, it would share it with the US and the UK, who, in turn, would share it with Ukraine.
It would seem that for the Kremlin, there is no topic, no matter how remote, that cannot be linked to Ukraine, if it can be twisted and spun to blame Ukraine and its supporters for all the world’s ills. Don’t be deceived!
Also on the EUvsDisinfo radar this week:
- Gearing up for the cold season, the Kremlin unleashes a new batch of disinformation about energy. In a perverse aggressor-victim role reversal, Moscow claims that Kyiv has caused an energy collapse in Kharkiv. Of course, the situation in Kharkiv and other frontline cities of Ukraine is difficult. But the root cause is Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and its daily attacks, disrupting electricity, heating, and water supplies to the civilian population. Since 10 October 2022, Russia has launched dozens of targeted missile strikes on the Ukrainian energy system. According to the Ministry of Energy of Ukraine, from October 2022 to September 2024, Ukrainian energy infrastructure facilities were subjected to 1,024 Russian attacks.
- Just in time for the 79th session of the UN General Assembly, the Kremlin’s mouthpieces proposed the truly bizarre idea that a UN mandate must be introduced for the territories given to Poland on Stalin’s will. While it may seem far-fetched at first glance, this narrative is part of an ongoing pro-Kremlin effort for re-write history and whitewash Stalin in an attempt to revise the political results of WWII and the Yalta-Potsdamsystem of international relations. Poland has been a particularly frequent target for these pro-Kremlin disinformation attempts. The decision to hand Silesia, part of East Prussia, and other former German territories to the Polish state was made not by Stalin but by a joint decision of the US, the UK and the USSR at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 and the Potsdam Conference in July-August 1945. The Red Army liberated Poland from Nazi occupation, but it didn’t mean liberty for this country as the USSR kept Poland under its control for the next 44 years, bringing decades of communist oppression.
- The Kremlin’s disinformation purveyors also skirted the farther fringes of conspiracy theories, claiming that the British government funds propaganda to force people into eating insects. This was a gross misrepresentation of the efforts to bolster the consumption of alternative proteins, such as plant-based proteins, lab-grown meats and protein-rich algae, as a means to reduce the climate impact of the meat industry. Of course, insect-based protein may be consumed too, but there is hardly a global conspiracy to force people to eat bugs, as the Kremlin would like you to believe. In fact, such disinformation stories aim to promote a recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative about secret elites ruling the destiny of the masses. The ultimate goal of these messages is to undermine democratic institutions and promote the narrative of a ‘decaying West’.
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