As promised yesterday, here are my takeaways from two items that immediately caught my eye in the news.

First: Dmitri Medvedev. Outside of Russia, not exactly a household name, but one that was more familiar between 2008 and 2012, when he stepped up to be the official President of Russia for one term while Vladimir Putin cooled his heels as Prime Minister until he could legally run for a third . . . and a fourth . . . and, coming up next year, a fifth six-year term, predictably to be followed by a sixth in 2030. Because during Medvedev’s four years on the throne, he quietly managed — at Putin’s direction, of course — to engineer a constitutional amendment stretching presidential terms almost to infinity. Sort of like the “Tsar for life” thing.

At the time, though, Medvedev seemed to be a man of moderate political views . . . a decidedly pleasant change from Putin’s menacing countenance. But how looks can deceive! Today, comfortably ensconced as Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council,* he has for some time taken a hard line, throwing threats around like handfuls of confetti. And most recently, the word “nuclear” has found its way into nearly every one of his threatening speeches.

* Since the Chairman of the Security Council is none other than Vladimir Putin himself, Medvedev’s title of “Deputy” Chairman is misleading; in fact, he sits directly at Putin’s elbow on security matters. 

Most recently, he has reimagined Ukraine’s attempts to reclaim their own territory as “attacks” upon what Russia considers to be their property. As reported by Ukrainska Pravda, Medvedev is quoted as saying on Telegram:

“Ukrainian criminals announced that they received approval for any strikes throughout Russia, for example, Crimea . . . If this is true (and there is no reason to doubt it now), then this is direct, legally significant evidence of the West’s complicity in the war against Russia on the side of [Ukraine] . . . Sad, unfortunately. The prophecies of the Apocalypse are getting closer.”

A quick fact-check of that one short paragraph turns up a couple of blatantly obvious, even laughable, misstatements of fact. First, Crimea is not part of Russia. At the behest of Nikita Khrushchev, on February 19, 1954, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union issued a decree transferring the Crimean Oblast from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Russia invaded and laid claim to it 60 years later, in 2014, and has illegally occupied it since then.

And second, this war cannot conceivably be characterized as a “war against Russia,” when the whole world witnessed Russia staging its so-called “special military operation” into Ukraine in February of 2022.

There’s been more from Medvedev . . . too much more to cite here. The first question that comes to my mind is: Why? What is the motive behind his recent transformation from a seemingly reasonable man to a blatant, vicious warmonger? Is he merely trying to curry favor with Putin? Or does he have his eye on the Kremlin throne for himself when, inevitably, Putin no longer occupies it? Or perhaps something entirely different? It’s too soon to tell, but I hope we (the U.S. and our allies) figure it out before he goes completely off the rails.

*. *. *

But overt threats are not Russia’s sole propaganda weapons; they also excel at covert operations. After all, they’ve had centuries of practice. Thus, I was also drawn to an article by CNN’s Katharina Krebs, concerning the late Yevgeny Prigozhin’s network of “internet trolls” — his Internet Research Agency (IRA) — and the recent dissemination of online messages blaming “enemies from the West” for the plane crash in which Prigozhin and nine others were killed last week. This shouldn’t be all that surprising; it has been known for some time that the IRA has meddled in the politics of other countries, notably including U.S. presidential elections.

Ms. Krebs goes on to state that it is unclear at this time whether the IRA still exists, but independent analysts have been keeping tabs on “several dozen Russian troll accounts on the social networks Vkontakte and X, formerly known as Twitter.”

I don’t have enough information on this subject to offer any meaningful commentary at this time. But it seems evident to me that, while Yevgeny Prigozhin is gone from this Earth, his influence is likely to stick around for some time to come. He had many followers, and not all of them will go skipping merrily over to Putin’s team. Just look, for example, at the makeshift memorial (below) left at the Wagner Center immediately following the plane crash, and even before Prigozhin’s presence on the flight had been confirmed. The caption beneath the photograph reads: “In this hell you were best.”

Somebody out there misses him.

And of course, it is no secret that — since well before the advent of the internet — the dissemination of propaganda throughout the world has long been a specialty of Russia (and the Soviet Union before it). The McCarthy hearings — the communist witch hunt of the 1950s — may have been serious overkill, but they were initially grounded in truth. And throughout the Cold War — and even today — our government agencies, military, defense contractors, financial institutions, scientific and manufacturing industries, colleges and universities, think tanks, and even the entertainment industries, have been riddled with infiltrators spewing the Russian line. And doing it in such a way that their targets have no idea who those people are, the nature of their lies, or that their purpose is to destabilize the very foundation of our precious Republic. And both sides of the political spectrum — conservatives and liberals alike — are unwittingly susceptible to Russia’s insidious methods of turning our own people against our government, and against each other.

This is nothing new; we’ve been living with it for decades. It’s simply taken on a new, better-organized, and more widespread form in the cyberworld in which we now live. For the most part, it’s S.S.D.D.: Same Shit, Different Day. The last thing we need now is another witch hunt. But what we do need is to be on the alert; and that requires — first and foremost — knowledge. We need to be smart.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
8/31/23