Putin’s Crimea Propaganda Machine

[DonViejo]

Oleg Shynkarenko

To justify its invasion of Crimea, the Kremlin and state-run media went into full fabrication mode this weekend. Here are the lies that Russia is telling its viewers back home.

Russia invaded Ukraine over the weekend, justifying its incursion by claming it needed to protect Crimea’s ethnic Russian population from supposed neo-Nazi extremists. This was pure propaganda, of course—Vladmir Putin has been keen to annex land that used to be part of Russia, as he did in Georgia in 2008, and seems to think that the Ukrainian army will and should immediately surrender to the Russian one.

Still, Putin needed a story to spin, no matter how full of holes, and thus the neo-Nazi claims. But as it turns out, Crimea’s streets are not exactly paved with extremists—a fact that has proven troublesome for Russian state TV channels looking to find token far-right bogeymen. They’ve had to resort to tricks to get the right characters for Russian audiences—making much, for instance, of Sachko Bilyi, a buffoon who visited a local parliament with his AK-47 machine gun. No one in Ukraine thinks much of Bilyi, other than that he’s a clown, but Russian TV is now claiming that squads made up of thousands of Bilyis are terrorizing Ukraine’s civilians and intimidating MPs.

The Russian media also reported on “skirmishes” on the streets of Crimea and showed a video about “extremists in Crimea attacking Russian soldiers.” As it turns out, the video was actually made on February 20, when close to 100 protesters, aid workers and journalists were shot by snipers in Kiev. That day, several cameramen filmed the terror on location—one of them standing nearby for a very long time. When his video surfaced on Russian TV, purporting to be from Crimea, it made many suspect that the cameraman was from Russia and that Russian journalists may have had an arrangement with the snipers so that they wouldn’t draw fire.

For additional help manufacturing scenes of outrage, Russian provocateurs in Simferopol organized a nice mise-en-scene for Putin’s propaganda machine. A bus filled with people dressed like paramiliatry fighters, toting machine guns and grenade launchers, were filmed by Russian journliasts. It appeared instantly on the Internet and Russian TV channels, labeled as “The Right Sector from the Western Ukraine attacking peaceful Russian citizens and killing soldiers in Crimea.” But if one looks closely, it is possible to make out several important details: the bus from ‘the Western Ukraine’ in fact has a Crimean license plate number, and the fighters are armed with GM-94 grenade launchers and AK-100 machine guns, which are only used by Russian soldiers. Another question: how did Right Sector extremists manage to get to Simferopol on a big bus after all the roads to Crimea were blocked three days ago by armed police and Russian soldiers? Several jounralists tried to pass through the cordons, but in vain. Apparently only armed fighters and extremists can get permission to go to Crimea. Later, Russian consul general Vyacheslav Svetlichnyi dismissed reports of casulaties amongst Russian citizens and soldiers in Crimea as mere rumor.

more
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/03/putin-s-crimea-propaganda-machine.html