NYT on the situation, part six

[Mark Kohut]

The Kremlin has been on a full propaganda push since last year, not just in
Russia but also in the separatist regions of eastern Ukraine, and even in
Kyiv, the capital. Moscow has accused Ukraine of plotting a genocide
against ethnic Russians and denounced Ukrainians as Nazi sympathizers.
Russian officials have also accused Ukraine and the United States of
hatching secret plots to justify an intervention or invasion of
separatist-controlled territory.

On Sun, Feb 13, 2022 at 5:58 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Those concerns show how difficult it is for any democracy to go toe-to-toe
> with an autocratic state, like Russia. Unconstrained by truth, the Kremlin
> is simply better at such unconventional warfare.
>
> “Remember, Vladimir Putin is a K.G.B. guy. He doesn’t think like Biden
> does,” said Daniel Hoffman, a former Moscow station chief for the C.I.A.
> “Putin comes from Mars and Biden’s from Venus. Vladimir Putin is playing
> his own game and his chess games may be a little different than ours.”
>
> During many of his recent military forays, Mr. Putin has used
> disinformation to create doubt about what he is doing. Such tactics have
> slowed international responses and allowed Mr. Putin to more easily achieve
> his aims. When masked men began taking over government buildings in Crimea
> in February 2014, Moscow said they were part of a locally led pro-Russian
> uprising. Only after Crimea was taken over was it clear the “little green
> men” were Russian military forces.
>
> Showing its ease with information warfare, Moscow responded quickly after
> Biden administration officials warned lawmakers this month about the
> enormous possible human costs if Mr. Putin launched a full invasion.
> “Madness and scaremongering continues,” Russia’s deputy ambassador to the
> United Nations, Dmitry Polyanskiy, wrote last Saturday on Twitter
> <https://twitter.com/Dpol_un/status/1490153915811340288?s=20&t=Vv_qihz81GE6hQha0pGjkg>.
> “What if we would say that US could seize London in a week and cause 300K
> civilian deaths? All this based on our intelligence sources that we won’t
> disclose.”
>
> After Mr. Sullivan’s remarks on Friday, Russia’s Foreign Ministry
> <https://mid.ru/ru/press_service/publikacii-i-oproverzenia/oproverzenia1/nedostovernie-publikacii/1798160/> accused
> the United States of conducting a “coordinated information attack” that it
> said was “aimed at undermining and discrediting Russia’s fair demands for
> security guarantees, as well as at justifying Western geopolitical
> aspirations and military absorption of Ukraine’s territory.”
>
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