Paul
Goble
Staunton, August 26 – Russian government
media outlets pushed demands for the federalization of Ukraine after the
Kremlin indicated that was what Vladimir Putin wanted and then almost as
quickly toned down its promotion of that idea apparently after it began to
resonate in the regions of the Russian Federation itself.
At the request of Znak.com, the
media research firm Medialogy counted the number of references to the idea of
federalization of Ukraine in Russian government media, including First Channel,
Russia 1,NTV, Vesti FM, “Rossiiskaya gazeta,” “Komsomolskaya Pravda,” and “Izvestiya”
(znak.com/moscow/articles/25-08-19-42/102822.html).
In
March, these outlets referred to “federalization” 209 times; in April 1424
times; in May, 944 times; in June 116 times; and in July, only 14 times, a
pattern that reflects the way in which the Kremlin media created an issue and
then backed away from it as the regime’s priorities shifted and the risks
involved in promoting that idea became apparent.
Medialogy
experts explained this and related patterns of Russian government media
coverage of Ukraine by suggesting that “for Russian propaganda, the task of creating
the image of the enemy is primary relative to the task of promoting its own
values and demands,” a pattern that sets Russian propaganda under Putin apart
from that of other countries.
Aleksey Makarkin, the deputy head of
the Moscow Center for Political Technologies, told Znak.com that he did not see
anything “illogical” in the way the Russian government media had dealt with
this issue.
It is the case, he said, that “initially”
no one in eastern Ukraine took the idea seriously because it was obvious that
the task ahead “was not in federalization but in the maximum rapprochement with
Russia either according to the Transdniestria variant or what would have been
ideal the Crimean one.”
According to Makarkin, “the demand
for ‘federalization within Ukraine’ was addressed more to the West in order to
show that there moderate politicians call for the broadening of the rights of
their territories for reform and that the Ukrainian authorities were not
listening to these demands.”
Openly separatist demands are one
thing, he continued, while “federalization is a moderate demand.” But “the West did not accept this game having
from the beginning adopted an absolutely pro-Ukrainian position.” And after the
events in Odessa on May 2, Makarkin said, Moscow stopped talking as much about
it as well.
But Gleb Kuznetsov, a Moscow political consultant,
disagreed. He told Znak.com that the inconsistency in Moscow’s treatment of
federalization reflected the fact that “the Russian authorities cannot
formulate a precise picture of the future from their own side.” And that is reflected in the fact that Russia
is struggling not for something but against “enemies.”
As such, Russian propaganda is very
different from its American counterpart, Kuznetsov said. The United States, he
said, first specifies that “the American people want the following because its
values are such and such and then the entire picture is pushed forward on the
basis of these demands.”
Russian propaganda, in contrast, “does
not specify what the Russian people need, what the Russian world is, or what
its values and interests are. As a result, we turn out to be in the position of
a victim: ‘they are beating us; we will grow strong in response.’” That message
is not the best one to be delivering either at home or abroad, Kuznetsov
suggests.
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