Paul Goble
Staunton, Sept. 25 – The Russian information agency Novosti posted an article saying that the Lithuanian parliament’s support for doing away with the ban on the deployment of nuclear weapons in that Baltic country opens the way for another Russian “special military operation” against it and warning that such an SVO would be “very short.”
A few hours later, the text was deleted ostensibly because “the material ‘does not correspond to the opinion of the editorial board, its policies and the policies of the Russian Federation” (meduza.io/news/2026/09/25/propagandisty-iz-ria-novosti-opublikovali-kolonku-o-tom-chto-rossiyu-zhdet-esche-odna-svo-v-litve-a-potom-udalili-ee).
This is the latest example of a longstanding operational principle of the Kremlin’s media operations, one that calls for delivering a message and then claiming it doesn’t mean it and so giving Moscow an opportunity to encourage some in the West to think that the powers that be are somehow more “peace-loving” than they are.
The author of the article, Aleksandr Nosovich, certainly knows how this game is played. He is a member of the Russian Council for Foreign and Defense Policy and editor of the pro-Moscow RuBaltic.ru portal in Kaliningrad. In 2020, a Dossier investigation linked him to the Presidential Administration and Russian foreign intelligence service.
What is critical is that no one be deceived by what is going on: The Kremlin wants to threaten Lithuania in order to destabilize it; and articles like Nosovich’s do that; but at the same time, it wants to be able to present itself to useful idiots in the West as indicated in peace in Ukraine and cooperation in Europe.
No comments:
Post a Comment