Subscriber+ Exclusive Reports — In a recent Russian TV program, Russian lawmaker Dmitry Novikov said that political turmoil and division in the United States is serious. “That’s good,” It means his country and his people. “Destabilization within the enemy is always a good thing.”
that ~ before Attempted assassination of Donald Trump.
Kremlin propagandists seized on Saturday’s shooting in Pennsylvania as the latest example of America’s political dysfunction. Russian media influencers have been pushing this theme for years, especially since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. After Trump was shot, Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs He said American democracy was “on the verge of suicide.”
Within hours of the attempted assassination of Trump, Russian media disinformation campaigns were at a fever pitch. There were three basic storylines: that the Biden administration had enabled or inspired the assassination, that the U.S. had actually carried out the attack, or (in a twisted version of blaming Russia’s two enemies) that Ukrainians had conspired to kill Trump with the help of U.S. intelligence.
While all of this was unfounded, the theory reached a national audience in a country that lacks factual news about the West. While similar false narratives flourished on American social media platforms, the Russian version was spread by government officials and some of the country’s most popular media figures and influencers.
The Kremlin version of events
For years, Russian propagandists have warned, without evidence, that Democrats are conspiring to kill Trump. At one point, they suggested Russian security services “must start protecting our Donald.”
On Sunday night, Vladimir Solovyov, one of the most influential Kremlin-backed media figures, made his position clear. Sunday evening with Solovyov A TV show that reminded us that they predicted Trump would be assassinated. He then said: He argued that if the U.S. Secret Service were “not unprofessional and stupid,” its agents would have been involved in the plot.
In the Kremlin’s first official statement on the attack on Sunday morning, President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov echoed those sentiments.
“After numerous attempts to remove candidate Trump from the political stage,” Peskov said“It was clear to all outside observers that his life was in danger.”
The Kremlin then took the line of many Trump supporters, accusing the Biden administration of creating an atmosphere that “provokes attacks.”
Peskov said Biden and the Democrats provoked the assassination attempt by trying to force him out of the race, “first using legal tools, the courts and prosecutors, to politically discredit and compromise the candidate.”
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova took up the topic and discussed it in more depth.
“Exactly two months ago, I learned that in America I was literally encouraging hatred against my political opponents.” Zakharova wrote She proposed that the money the U.S. had pledged to Ukraine be redirected to investing in “American police forces… and other services that are supposed to ensure law and order within the United States.”
Since the invasion of Ukraine, Russian officials and state media have taken every opportunity to criticize the United States and the West, and some prominent commentators have rejoiced in the aftermath of Trump’s attacks, calling them evidence of the “deep erosion” of “American democracy” and warning that its demise is near.
In addition to her obviously influential position at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Zakharova has over 1.5 million followers on the Telegram and Vkontakte platforms. In a follow-up post, She wrote “Every American media outlet and commentator who has commented on the attempted assassination of Trump has unanimously stated that this is a ‘threat to American democracy.’ I want to make it clear that this is American democracy driven to a state of suicidal abandon by liberalism.”
“The breakup of America no longer seems like an impossible prophecy,” she added.
American on Russian TV
Outside government buildings, things got stranger.
Margarita Simonyan is one of the most influential voices in Russia and, not coincidentally, one of Putin’s favorite propaganda spokesmen. She is the head of the RT media empire and her audience on various social networks is estimated to be in the tens of millions. Simonyan has likened the attacks on Trump to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. She has suggested that he was killed by elements within his own administration.
“When all other means of removing an inconvenient president have been exhausted” Written by Simonyan “The old Lee Harvey Oswald is here,” she said on her Telegram channel.
She added, “Watching America is like watching a TV series where the writers ran out of imagination a long time ago and now they just repeat it episode after episode, but you already get used to the characters and you keep watching it, like you’re getting used to your house slippers.”
Solovyov also runs a network called “Solovyov Live,” which this week hosts a Sunday morning program. dawn Hosting American guests, John Baroli, a former journalist living in Russia and now working in public relations, often followed the Kremlin line, even on Sundays.
“The Democratic Party is behind this assassination attempt.” Baroli said“The Democrats are doing everything they can to destroy Donald Trump. They’ve been threatening to eradicate him for years.”
Russia and Putin have been sanctioned and indicted by the International Criminal Court for extrajudicial killings around the world, but now another Kremlin propagandist, political scientist Sergei Markov, says the attempt on Trump’s life is just another example of US-backed “political murder” that may be coming to Moscow.
“The new techniques of political murder are creating a climate of total hatred against some politicians and encouraging activists to kill them.” Markov said. “So they are preparing assassination attempts on Putin, (Hungarian President Viktor) Orban and (French opposition figure Marine) Le Pen.”
Beyond the lack of evidence for these claims, it is worth emphasizing that not all of these people and their platforms are located in the outskirts of Russia. They have huge audiences and followers, and there is little competition from legitimate and impartial sources of information.
In another example, the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti, which is carried by thousands of local media outlets across Russia, one of the most cited “analysts,” Piotr Akopov, wrote after the Pennsylvania shooting that Trump’s political enemies “regret not having killed him before November 2016.”
Akopov said it was “not surprising” that the Secret Service failed to neutralize the assassin, since their agents would have been involved in the operation. Given Trump’s popularity, he wrote, “killing him has become a no-brainer scenario for the Washington deep state swamp.”
Let’s blame the Ukrainian people
It didn’t take long for Russian politicians to come up with another theory, one that is often referred to as the “Ukrainian trace” – “evidence” of a connection between Ukraine and crime.
“Given that the Kiev regime has repeatedly made very negative statements about Trump, who promised to end the military conflict in Ukraine if elected US president, I urge the US authorities to consider the allegations that Ukrainian special forces were involved in the assassination attempt,” Sergiy Chekov, a member of the international affairs committee of the Federation Council (Russia’s upper house), told RIA Novosti.
Aid to Ukraine is likely to decline under a second Trump administration. Added by Tsekov.It gave Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a clear incentive to get rid of Trump.
American Baroli added his voice to this theory: “Seriously, I believe that Ukrainian special forces could be behind this, on orders from the White House.”
Among Russian analysts, the only voices opposing the conspiracy theory were those heard abroad. Vladimir Pastukov, a prominent Russian political scientist who now lives in London, said when he heard the news in Pennsylvania on Monday, he immediately wondered whether the Russian media would blame Ukraine.
“I said this morning that the search for Ukrainian traces in the Trump assassination attempt would soon fill all media space in Russia. Before the idea even crossed my mind, at least two (Russian) senators… had already voiced it.”
He added that the next likely outcome would be reports in the Russian media linking the assassin to Ukraine.
“I think in the near future Moscow will fill social media with installations about the Ukrainian background of the assassination attempt,” Pastukov said. “They will find Ukrainian relatives, neighbors, (the shooter’s) girlfriends, they will find connections with (Ukrainian military intelligence chief) Kirill Budanov, they will get hold of secret personal correspondence with Zelensky.”
Another opinion, outside Russia, argued that America’s political drama was a gift to America’s enemies.
“This election has done more to tarnish the reputation of American democracy than Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping could ever hope for,” said Sergei Ratchenko, a historian at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. I wrote to X. “I worry about the image I project to the outside world.”
Radchenko, like Russian lawmaker Dmitry Novikov, who is quoted in the first line of this article, wrote this piece before the shootings in Pennsylvania.
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