We are now going to sign off on what has been a pretty quiet day in Ukraine, relatively speaking. Until we resume again tomorrow, you can follow all our ongoing Ukrainian news coverage here.
Good morning. We'll start the live blog today with an excerpt from an op-ed by Alexei Beyer for the Kyiv Post on Russian propaganda about Ukraine. He seems pretty sanguine about it all really:
A lot of money and effort have gone into developing this propaganda machine. But does it really matter?
It would have, if it colored perception in the West about Russia and Eastern Ukraine, but very few people in Western Europe and the United States watch Russia Today and other propaganda outlets broadcasting in foreign languages. In any case, Western leaders are well aware of the danger which Putin’s policies pose to the world order and peace in Eastern Europe. True, they’re not sure how to respond to it yet, but their decision-making is not going to be in any way influenced by what Dmitry Kiselyov or Vladimir Solovyov blabber on their programs.
There would have been danger for Ukraine if Russian-language propaganda were winning fresh converts to the separatist cause. This may be the reason why the Ukrainian government has banned Russian TV broadcasts. But for most Ukrainians, the lies Russia spreads about their country are the biggest turnoff from separatism. Russian lies only add to what Ukrainians already know about the situation on the ground in Donetsk and Lugansk. Kiselyov and Solovyev, along with other buffoons on Russian television, have made an invaluable contribution to bolstering Ukrainian patriotism.
It is true that many Russian volunteers fighting for the separatists in Eastern Ukraine were encouraged to go there by the supposed outrages of the Ukrainian side reported by Russian TV. However, the majority of those volunteers are hard-drinking, unemployed guys who don’t have much to do at home. Their participation in the conflict has been a mixed blessing for the Russian government, and it has a good cause to fear their return to Mother Russia. In Eastern Ukraine, meanwhile, Russian volunteers have not been a major factor. As documented in “Putin. War”, a report compiled by Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov and published after his murder, it is Russian intelligence operative, Russian regular troops and Russian supplies of war materiel that started the war and are the only reason it continues.
Russia is not a liberal democracy where the electorate can vote in a new government if it doesn’t like the old one. Russian so-called voters decide nothing, and there is no tradition of mass protests. In the final analysis, it probably makes little difference that 86% of Russians love and admire Putin and support his every policy initiative. If a similar proportion of Russians hated and despised him, Putin’s policies would not have changed materially.
Read the entire article here