Kremlin propagandists brace for US inauguration
As the US prepares for the inauguration of its new president, Russian outlets have been busy crafting stories challenging NATO, criticising Western unity, and promoting Russian interests. Kremlin propaganda has been rife with fantasies about hypothetical US wars of aggression against Canada and attacks on Greenland.
Russian TV propagandist Vladimir Solovyov recently used these Kremlin narratives to justify calls for the restoration of all Soviet territory. Russian outlets have gleefully portrayed the incoming US administration as a potential source of division within the transatlantic community and of a weakened or possibly even dismantled NATO.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov recently compared a potential referendum in Greenland with the illegal annexation referendums in the Ukrainian regions of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Luhansk and Donetsk, pretending that these manipulated shows, held at Russian gun-point in September 2022 in the midst of war and deportation, were trustworthy local expressions.
Tempered ‘realism’
At a recent press conference, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, however, offered quite a measured comment, saying, ‘If Mr. Donald Trump aims to make America great again after taking office, we will have to closely monitor the methods he uses to achieve that goal’.
RT’s chief propagandist, Margarita Simonyan, also appeared to temper her excitement about what the new US administration could mean for Russia’s war of aggression. In a recent interview, she suggested that ‘it is realistic that both Trump and [Russia] could agree that we stop at the line of contact [frontlines in Ukraine]. Everything on our side of the line would be ours’. As she preached ‘realism’ or the Kremlin trope ‘realities on the ground’, she expressed disappointment, adding, ‘Of course, I would want Odesa, Kyiv, Kharkiv, and everything else’. Her statements quickly led to criticism from war hawks in Russia: ‘Why should the realisation of the objectives of the special military operation be tied to events in American domestic politics?’, some of them asked.
Russian outlets abuzz with hopes for a Trump-Putin summit
The prevailing narrative from Moscow, however, has been that the incoming US administration will display political astuteness and may challenge transatlantic relations, while Russian outlets have been abuzz with talks of a potential high-level meeting between Putin and Trump.
Several Russian officials recently praised Trump’s supposed ‘acknowledgment of NATO’s lie about not expanding eastward’, with Lavrov commenting that ‘for the first time, a Western leader, honestly acknowledged that NATO lied when signing numerous documents, both with Russia and within the framework of the OSCE’.
However, in the referenced speech by Trump, he by no stretch of the imagination made or alluded to an acknowledgement of the alleged ‘promise by NATO not to expand eastward’ – which has been repeated by the Kremlin’s propaganda outlets an endless number of times and equally debunked by us an infinite number of times.
Despite building up these ambitious narratives, Russia faces a more complicated reality. While propagandists frame the potential change in US leadership as an opportunity, Russia remains entrenched in economic stagnation and political isolation. Sanctions continue to weigh heavily on the economy, and while Russian leadership hopes for a breakthrough, it is unlikely that a change in the US administration will dramatically shift the country’s stagnating economy or its global standing.
