Don’t fall for Russia’s propaganda

As the annual appropriations season looms in Washington, the debate over America’s continued financial support for Ukraine’s defense against invader Russia will be contentious. Some Republicans are raising objections due to our runaway national debt, as well as fears over repeating the debacle of taxpayer dollars wasted or stolen in Afghanistan and Iraq over the last two decades.  

But concerns over fiscal prudence aside, some on the right also harbor a lingering affection for what they see as a bastion of “traditional values” in Russia. For over a decade, Vladimir Putin has made ample use of public fora to masquerade as an ally to social conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic. 

Don’t buy it. This is a trusty old rhetorical ruse used for centuries by Russia’s imperial, Soviet and contemporary leaders, and it’s now being used to dupe Western conservatives into an apathetic lull. The dismal state of contemporary Russian society belies the Kremlin’s messaging.

Writing in 1851, French historian Jules Michelet observed that the greatest Russian threat to Europe was its propaganda, a noteworthy perspective given Moscow’s not-so-distant defeat of Napoleon’s armies. Michelet described Russia’s messaging to European elites as a means of sowing doubt and confusion, perverting Western ideals devoted to service of the oppressed and humankind’s liberty. Michelet wrote: “Yesterday it [Russian propaganda] told us: I am Christianity; tomorrow it will tell us, I am socialism.”

Since the 19th century, czars, commissars and presidents alike have, like chameleons, tried to take on the colors of the moment, be it nationalism, pan-Slavism, socialism/communism and now social conservatism. The goal is always to neutralize those who should be the most effective in opposing the perpetual colonial ambitions of Russia’s elites. It was not an accident that the USSR was a “union” of “republics.”

Present-day Russia underlines the emptiness of Moscow’s latest ideological pose. Despite massive, state-backed church construction, Russians’ attendance remains abysmally low, at 1 percent. Domestic violence against Russian women is epidemic. While liquor consumption has allegedly decreased from 15.76 liters annually per capita in 2011, state reports of a drop to 10.5 liters by 2019 are questionable. These illnesses hardly bespeak victory for Putin’s social agenda.

But Russia’s drive to expand its dominion remains unchanged since the last czars. Moscow’s duplicitous export of communist ideology to serve its enduringly imperialistic aims was not a 20th century exception. Whether Romanov, Soviet or Federation, Russia’s modus operandi remains territorial expansion.

Russia has been ruled by a series of amoral absolutists, each seeking to accumulate power at the expense of its neighbors, including Poland, the Baltics, the Caucasus and Ukraine. All throughout, the Kremlin has endeavored to manipulate Western powers through ideological chicanery.

Quoting correspondence between Britain’s Lord Palmerston and foreign secretary Lord Clarendon in 1853, the Russian government’s policy has always been “to put forward its encroachments as fast and as far as the apathy or want of firmness of other governments would allow it to go, but always to stop and retire when it was met with decided resistance, and then to wait for the next favorable opportunity to make another spring on its intended victim.”

Sound familiar? This pattern has been repeated from the Baltic to the Black Sea for hundreds of years.

The Kremlin is not concerned about its people; rather, its ruling autocrats historically strive to preserve the state at any and all cost. And as a result, authoritarian Russia will continue to be a menace to U.S., transatlantic and global security for decades to come. It is the Mordor to our Shire. Once-wishful thinking that the West could “get” Russia to align with the U.S. in our looming conflict with China need look at the Kremlin’s behavior historically. There is no evidence that a Russia that is unwilling to come to terms with its history of immeasurable crimes against neighboring peoples will benefit a transatlantic alliance of democracies — precisely the opposite.

Russians must reckon with their multitude of crimes. A good start would be a public recognition akin to German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s Kniefall von Warschau, when in 1970 he courageously took the knee before a monument honoring the Warsaw Ghetto’s fallen. But judging from Putin-approved mass media messaging of the chauvinist myths that now constitute its textbooks’ education, Russians remain locked in a downward spiral of misinformation, denial, victimhood and subsequent isolation.

Until Russians acknowledge their myriad crimes throughout history, the committed policy of Western leaders right and left should be to resume the containment policy that well served the U.S. and our allies throughout the last century. At this moment, Ukraine’s freedom fighters are not only defending tens of millions of innocents in a majority Uniate Catholic and Orthodox Christian state, they are exhausting a murderous colonial empire.

Whether loudly or softly, signaling approval of Putin’s alleged social conservatism does not protect Americans or our interests, nor our allies’. What doesserve our interests is giving Ukrainians what it takes to win the war for us all.

Richard Kraemer is the president of the US-Europe Alliance and a senior fellow at the European Values Center, Prague.