Now, your comment format follows a pretty typical pattern utilized by paid Russian trolls, so I'm likely wasting my time here. But anyway:
There is a slight difference between de-platforming Russian propaganda channels in the West, and Russia jailing anybody speaking about the war in any other terms than those approved by Kremlin.
The issue isn’t “propaganda” in the general sense. It is “war propaganda, denying war crimes Russia is committing, lying about the invasion of a European country, etc”. Your comparison doesn’t make much sense.
I am sure they are also willing to pay big rubles for people sabotaging the ability of western countries to have meaningful debates and discussions. Messing with the reality finding mechanism of your opponent is as good as it gets during wartime. And that is most effective if you overdrive the narratives people already believe.
edit: Case and point, OP is flagged and no longer visible. This is how successful Russian information operations look like. There is nothing the Kremlin can publish that is going to convince any meaningful section of western society, but getting them to put on blinders is incredibly easy. And once they are on, we are screwed. When stuff becomes unthinkable it becomes incredibly easy to exploit. Not to mention that believing your own propaganda targeted at the morale of English speaking Russian soldiers is already really dangerous.
The difference is that russian state owned propaganda is actively and intentionally trying to hurt western society. If there are two ways to do something and one way will do more damage then it will be done that way.
I do think that it is within a nations right and responsibility to defend against such actors.
Naturally there are no clear cut lines and things can get murky but this is the case with many aspects where we expect and accept government intervention.
I'm not claiming that there's no real difference; I'm claiming that it doesn't matter who agrees that Russia engages in propaganda. That doesn't change that America does as well.
Is Russia or America worse? I don't care which is worse, that doesn't matter. They both do wrong things.
I don’t follow “Russian propaganda”, I think for myself. Every source I have shared with you is a mainstream Western source, including experts whose JOB it was to deliver analyses for their governments. If I lived in Russia, I’d be surrounded by Russian propaganda and also would have to cut through it like any independently-thinking person. If anything, I am constantly exposed to “US propaganda” since I live here, and it is a concerted effort to shut out anything that is even slightly away from the predetermined, official line, (in this case that the invasion is “unjustified and unprovoked”). After 9-11 it was going to be “Islamofascism” but that didn’t poll well, so they switched to “they hate us for our freedoms” and “weapons of mass destruction”. You can sometimes tell propaganda by how contrived the phrase is (eg “hacking the election”) and how it is repeated verbatim like it was normal and not contribed at all. In Russia it is “special military operation”. Everyone has propaganda.
The attempt to label what half the world believes as “Russian Propaganda” is itseld a deligitimization tactic. Even within the most hawkish countries (like UK) there have been tons of voices clearly not on Russia’s payroll, but just as systematically ignored. This is a systemic problem:
No, that lame attempt by someone at Business Insider to try to spin it was already addressed in the Krystal Ball video I posted. Did you watch it? They argued that it was a mistranslation and the US “stopped” the peace deal, rather than “killing” it. Oh great. Not exactly “walking back” anything, the title is misleading. Any other sources for this?
When the war started, the Weat was pressuring Ukraine into a peace deal with Russia at any cost.
This seems… untrue. Nah, stronger than that, every available piece of evidence points the other way. Almost like Ukraine was led down a path where all pro-Russian doves were sidelined or eliminated, and all hawks were promised EU and NATO membership if they stayed the course.
What you said can’t possibly be true starting with the fact that the real-life timeline doesn’t match up. Bucha happened in late March, while the US killed the Bennett negotiation in early March.
Even solidly pro-Ukrainian media in Ukraine admitted that Boris Johnson traveled to Kyiv to kill any peace deal. To quote this Ukrainskaya Pravda article:
As soon as the Ukrainian negotiators and Abramovich/Medinsky, following the outcome of Istanbul, had agreed on the structure of a future possible agreement in general terms, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson appeared in Kyiv almost without warning.
"Johnson brought two simple messages to Kyiv. The first is that Putin is a war criminal; he should be pressured, not negotiated with. And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not. We can sign [an agreement] with you [Ukraine], but not with him. Anyway, he will screw everyone over", is how one of Zelenskyy's close associates summed up the essence of Johnson's visit.
Behind this visit and Johnson's words, there is much more than a simple reluctance to get involved in agreements with Russia.
Johnson’s position was that the collective West, which back in February had suggested Zelenskyy should surrender and flee, now felt that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined.
This totally contradicts your narrative, but to any person who’s been following the events since 2014 it makes sense that US and UK promised great things to Ukraine if they would leave Russia’s orbit up to and including having their population having a war with Russia. That’s been their MO since the beginning so it would be very strange if suddenly they would be “pressuring” Ukraine into an agreement.
2013: Before any invasions, armed conflicts, here is USA’s top people (including the very recently candidate for President, who hated Russia as he was a PoW in a USSR prison) fomenting a revolution against any Pro-Russian government — in this case Yanukovich who killed the extremely unpopular NATO integration that pro-NATO Yuschenko was pushing through against the wishes of the majority of Ukrainians … so McCain openly advocated for regime change: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=93eyhO8VTdg
2015-2019 Angela Merkel, Zelensky and Poroshenko all admitted that Minsk II was just “a way to give Ukraine the time it needed to build up its armed forces”. Poroshenko even calls the army “his baby”. The same army that is now conscripting and sacrificing huge numbers of men to double down on the counteroffensive:
At least they stopped the nonsense about people “lining up around the block to fight” and saying Ukraine doesn’t need to forcibly draft men into the war, while most propaganda says that Ukrainian men lined up around the block to fight:
2015-2018 - constant training and arming of radical groups, including neo-nazi elements, just as we have been arming radical groips with jihadist elements in parts of the world:
2019 - Arestovich openly says Ukraine needs a big war with Russia so it can emerge victorious as part of NATO. He eerily predicts all the elements of the war (like Dick Cheney 1994 video about Iraq) and then says it is preferable to being in Russia’s orbit 10 years later. He became the advisor to Zelensky, like Kellyann Conway was to Trump:
2021 - Ukraine absorbed the radical paramilitary groups into its army and they have been trained and armed for years to take on Russia. USA wants to avoid the “failure scenario” of how the Russo-Georgian war was brought to a quick end by Sarkozy. There has been peace and relative prosperity ever since. (I was in Georgia a few weeks ago, and it’s still a very poor country, but its economy was not destroyed, its population didn’t flee in the millions, and it doesn’t fear Russian attack at all. That is the result most reasonable people would want.)
US killed the deal with Bennett, and Boris Johnson personally told Zelensky to keep fighting since Russia appeared much weaker to the West than thought. Here we are a year later - and USA doesn’t want any peace agreements to happen.
Non-mainstream media in US, such as The Hill, Kim Iverson, Krystal Ball, progressive voices, conservative voices, Tulsi Gabbard, etc. are not all “Russian Propagandists”, despite what major hawks like Hillary or John Bolton would say, neither is the pope or the entire population or India or China or the heads of state if Brazil etc. Something else is going on here.
The kind of state propaganda you are talking about is a completely different thing.
Russia is explicitly paying for trolls, hackers, and bot farms to muck around in other countries with the explicit intent of advancing their geopolitical agenda and sowing confusion in countries that could respond.
Their ability is control news narratives is a different topic (although you also seem incredibly naïve as towards Putin's control over media within Russia).
Those channels were toxic propaganda, psyops designed to divide and weaken Russia's enemies. Such things are never tolerated in war. I do think this is a period in human history where we're going to have to let go of some naive notions pertaining to "freedom of speech".
Pretending there isn't a difference between "opinionated views" and collaborating with Russian military while spreading disinformation doesn't help you.
The examples you've provided have done the latter.
Stop using indirect language to hide your beliefs.
You're doing the "our glorious soldiers, their savage brutes" meme, with far too many words.
Virtually all of this is true about both USA and Russian media. There are some minor differences due to historical circumstances, but the bottom line is that both have massive & sophisticated domestic and foreign propaganda apparatuses. Both governments crack down hard on credible, organized threats to their control. Saying "I don't like $LEADER" on the street, alone, is neither, and you won't get persecuted in Moscow for doing this no matter how much Radio Free Europe insists.
> The information situation between Russia and the United States or any other Western country is not comparable.
I didn’t use the word never. I said they are not, i.e. the two words are not equivalent.
Yes there are rumours, are they propaganda? I don’t think so in this case - young male Russians are being questioned at the border, flights are being stopped, and the idea has been floated of forced conscription of anti-war protesters. Even mentioning the word war is a crime. Russia is very close to martial law already and I’m not surprised there is speculation about it.
Also, quite frankly no one in the west cares much if Putin imposes martial law, it’s already a pariah state and a dictatorship. As propaganda this rumour would be pretty useless.
There is a slight difference between de-platforming Russian propaganda channels in the West, and Russia jailing anybody speaking about the war in any other terms than those approved by Kremlin.
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