Russia Vows to Foil Western Meddling In Its Upcoming Elections

Russia Vows to Foil Western Meddling In Its Upcoming ElectionS

Andrew  Korybko 

28 July 2021

Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov vowed that his country will foil Western meddling in its upcoming elections, which he expects will be attempted through a variety of means including politicized foreign observers as well as the propagation of false narratives concerning Russia’s foreign and domestic policies which aim to negatively influence voters’ perceptions of the ruling authorities.

Western governments’ accusations about Russian meddling in their elections are actually nothing more than gaslighting to deflect from their own meddling in Russia’s elections. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov vowed that these multifaceted efforts won’t succeed, which he expects will be attempted through a variety of means including politicized foreign observers as well as the propagation of false narratives concerning Russia’s foreign and domestic policies which aim to negatively influence voters’ perceptions of the ruling authorities. About the second-mentioned dimension of this clandestine influence operation, he pointed to “The Navalny case, the Skripal saga, (and) the MH17 crash in the skies over Donbass”.

Earlier, head of the monitoring group tracking actions taken to interfere in Russia’s sovereign affairs in the period of preparing and holding the Russian legislative elections Vladimir Dzhabarov publicly speculated that Western anti-vaxxers might either be actual foreign agents or at the very least useful idiots of Western intelligence whenever they try to push their views onto Russians. Lavrov seemed to back up this suspicion by vaguely warning that the US was willing to back “extremists” in Russia. It deserves mentioning that President Putin condemned anti-vaxxers during last month’s live Q&A session for their “absolute rubbish” in implying that “all world leaders allegedly upped and conspired with each other” to lock down the planet for ulterior reasons.

It can therefore be confidently claimed that the Kremlin believes that Western-based anti-vaxxers who share their views with Russians constitute security threats whether they consciously understand the role that they play in influencing its domestic political processes or not. So too does it regard those in the Alt-Media Community (AMC) who parrot the Mainstream Media’s (MSM) narrative that Russia is supposedly “an enemy or a rival for the US” as constituting a similar threat after Russian Ambassador to the US Anatoly Antonov described those claims as “false information”. Although he was specifically talking about their propagation by the MSM, there’s no denying that they’re also pushed by the AMC too, sometimes even more aggressively.

These policies might surprise many Non-Russian Pro-Russians (NRPRs) who hitherto sincerely believed that Russia is against what quite a few of them regard as the shadowy global elite plot to exploit the COVID-19 pandemic for ulterior reasons as well as being against the West in general. As can now be seen by none other than President Putin’s own statement and that of the Russian Ambassador to the US, nothing of the sort is truly the case. Rather, those who hold such views are actually victims of a far-reaching and years-long influence operation perpetuated by those in the AMC who manipulated their perceptions about Russian policy for reasons that only they can account for if publicly challenged.

The most likely motives are either ideological, egotistical, and/or financial, the latter with respect to generating ad revenue through clickbait and/or soliciting donations from well-intended but naive members of their audience by playing to their wishful thinking expectations about Russia. Either way, NRPRs must finally accept the reality of Russian policy: President Putin is unequivocally convinced that those who don’t believe the MSM narrative about COVID-19 and vaccines are conspiracy theorists while his Ambassador to the US slammed those who spread claims about his country supposedly being “an enemy or rival for the US” (with the innuendo being that Russia aggressively tries to undermine America) for their “false information”.

Everyone is entitled to their own views of course regardless of why they believe whatever it is that they do, but the top representatives of the Russian state (its President, Foreign Minister, Ambassador to the US, and head of its parliament’s de facto counterintelligence group) do not want foreigners (whether genuinely misguided NRPRs, faux-NRPRs, and/or those with openly hostile intentions) spreading certain narratives among their people in the run-up to this September’s elections. All external efforts to influence Russian voters’ perceptions of the ruling authorities through those narratives, particularly anti-vaxx ones and the innuendo that Russia is aggressively trying to undermine the US, will be thwarted in order to protect the country’s democracy.

Source: One World