ANATOMY OF PROPAGANDA: TOP 3 EVENTS OF THE WEEK
16/10/2023, 13:00
The critical challenge to Russian propaganda has been the call for the Council of Europe to recognize Russia as a dictatorship and Putin as an illegitimate ruler. Simultaneously, propagandists have not ceased to distance themselves from Kremlin support for Hamas and to accuse the US of exacerbating Israeli-Palestinian relations. The pressure on dissenters is increasing - the authorities threaten them with persecution not only within the territory of the Russian Federation but also in all CIS countries.
The Kremlin responded in its characteristic aggressive manner to the resolution of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), calling on Council member states to declare Vladimir Putin illegitimate after the end of his current presidential term and to declare Russia a dictatorship. The media actively circulated the statement of the Russian Foreign Ministry's Special Representative Gennady Ascalovich, who said that PACE 'once again demonstrated its worthlessness by declaring Vladimir Putin an illegitimate president after 2024.'
Following Putin's lead, Russian propaganda attempts to shift the blame for the Hamas attack on Israel on US diplomacy. The Kremlin is trying to benefit from the situation in Israel. Firstly, it accuses the US of what happened. Secondly, it diverts the West's attention from Ukraine to the Middle East. However, such a policy leads to opposite consequences: Western media and politicians are inclined not to differentiate events in these hotspots but to see a common denominator - an aggressive attack by the Moscow-Tehran axis on the civilized world.
The Kremlin promises to pursue "foreign agents" and "undesirable" NGOs in Russia and CIS countries. Vasily Piskarev, Chairman of the State Duma Commission on Investigating Foreign Interference in Russia's Internal Affairs, pledged to share a list of undesirable foreign NGOs in Russia and a registry of "foreign agents" with partners in the CIS Inter-Parliamentary Assembly. The persecution will be carried out under the auspices of "joint counteraction to attempts of foreign interference."
