Yesterday as Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced $70 million in military aid to Kyiv, Russia embassy in Canberra posted a 2014 article by American political scientist John Mearsheimer titled “Why the Ukraine crisis is the West’s fault”.
According to the embassy, it’s the US and EU that bear greatest responsibility for Vladimir Putin’s invasion, which it claims is simply an operation to demilitarise Ukraine.
The embassy is not alone in towing the Kremlin’s line; similar arguments have been picked up by a handful of Russian apologists across the political spectrum who are fighting a largely unsuccessful battle to shift the narrative.
Far right joins the fray
Moscow’s talking points, ignored as propaganda by most in Australia, have been most enthusiastically adopted by some in the disparate morass that is Australia’s anti-vaccine far right, with Telegram channels being flooded with pro-Russian messaging over the past week.
The United Australia Party (UAP) recently disendorsed its candidate for Macnamara, Jefferson Earl, over pro-Putin posts. When anti-vaccine protesters descended on Canberra last month, UAP leader Craig Kelly escorted prominent Sydney-based Russian far-right nationalist Simeon Boikov into Parliament House.
Boikov, who goes by his alter ego “The Aussie Cossack”, has for some years been a loud, lonely, pro-Putin voice in Australia, leading a wannabe paramilitary (read: Cosplay) unit, and has defended forms of Russian aggression over the years, including the annexation of Crimea and the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17.
After the invasion, Boikov led a literal handful of supporters to demonstrate their support outside Sydney’s Russian consulate. But more of the Putin-boosting has gone online. This week Boikov did a 90-minute live stream on his YouTube channel, which has more than 150,000 subscribers, along with anti-vaccine influencer Maria Zee, where he blamed NATO’s militarisation for the invasion, and claimed Ukrainian officials were being controlled by the CIA. Zee questioned whether Putin was trying to take down the “new world order” or stop the “great reset”.
Another pro-Putin Facebook page, West United for Russia, which has sought to blame Ukraine and the West for the invasion, was set up by Sydney Bitcoin trader Sean Davis.
Useful idiots on the left
While the conspiracy-pilled right has been the most vocal in its support for the invasion, there’s been a noticeable strand of Putin apologia from the anti-imperialist left.
Renowned journalist and filmmaker John Pilger has sought to frame the invasion as the result of Ukrainian and NATO aggression. Before the invasion, he called Ukraine the “only neo-Nazi-infested country” in Europe, reflecting the narrative pushed by Putin (and, weirdly, his far-right supporters) that the invasion was justified as an act of “deNazification”.
Writing for Pearls and Irritations, former Australian ambassador to Poland Tony Kevin claimed Putin wanted better treatment for ethnic Russians in Ukraine, while “Washington and Kiev wanted confrontation and permanent East-West hostility”.
Meanwhile over in Green Left Weekly, the Socialist Alliance claimed the US and its allies had provoked the conflict by encircling Russia.
Embassy logs on to defend Putin
Unsurprisingly, the highest-profile support comes through Russia’s official channels, which have relentlessly stuck to Putin’s befuddling script. For weeks they furiously denied the military build-up on the border was the precursor to an invasion, before quickly pivoting.
In January, Russia’s ambassador to Australia Alexey Pavlovsky held a rare press conference, where he accused the Morrison government of “fanning hysteria”, and claimed the troops on the border were a “warning” to Ukraine, not a threat.
Two days before the invasion formally began, the Russian embassy’s Facebook page shared a long, rambling post from the Russian Foreign Ministry, attacking “fake news” about Putin’s “non-existent attack plans”, before detailing a list of stuff that happened in Latin America during the 19th century as further evidence of Western deceitfulness.
When Australia announced its first sanctions, following the US, UK and EU, the embassy attacked it as ignoring “ethnic cleansing” of Russian speakers in Donetsk and Luhansk, one of the pretexts used by Moscow to justify the invasion.
By Thursday, once the invasion had become an undeniable reality, the embassy reiterated Putin’s claim Russian troops were carrying out a military operation, supposedly justified under Article 51 of the UN Charter (which gives states the right to self-defence) to protect people from “humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiyv [sic] regime”.
The embassy claimed forces aren’t targeting Ukrainian cities with airstrikes. Kharkiv is facing rocket strikes, and Kyiv is bracing for a potential siege.
Subsequent posts have consistently blamed Kyiv for failing to secure peace, which the embassy claims Russia has tried to negotiate over the past eight years.
Foxtel’s decision to remove RT from streaming services was described as “censorship”. Violence against civilians is described as the work of Ukrainian nationalists, not Russian invaders. The Facebook comments haven’t been all that kind.
