For me the main difference is if the activity is clandestine and meant to deceive/hide the origin. Everybody tries to influence things their way. Doing it covertly is a hostile act. That does not mean that I would not condone hostile acts against my/our enemies but it is something take into account. And regarding your Russian examples, it showed for how long they have seen the west as enemies and conducted hostile acts.
Thats rather simple to understand, for somebody coming from eastern Europe. russian mentality permeated entire region during their enslavement of what is now eastern EU bloc for +-40 years, to have a battleground for nuclear war with west that never came. It happens when all your politics is orchestrated in moscow and you have almost a million soldiers deployed in bases all over the place for decades, with nuclear weapons and all that.
See, russians have massive inferiority complex. Against everybody, but mostly the more successful ones, meaning west in many aspects. Their approach to, well, everything is vastly ineffective, corruption, nepotism and similar stuff grinds any attempt at progress to almost halt. Just go there and see for yourself, they have money literally sticking out of ground left and right yet outside moscow and st petersburg you are in central Africa in terms of development.
All this, propagated to 21st century where everybody seems to go ahead of them. A lot of frustration, envy and schadenfreude. A (correct) feeling russia is left behind and becoming insignificant local force at best, and laughing stock of whole world more realistically. Plus, human life is generally almost worthless there, its mafia state pyramid to the core.
With all that, its vastly easier to keep reinventing enemies that are always guilty at damaging poor old russia, rather than cleaning up that clusterfuck and actually owning the shit they created for themselves. Its enough for general population. There is not much more actual stuff to the question 'why west', rest is just PR for simpler folks. A dictator never wants smart, strong and free population, double that for russia. Downtrodden, hopeless desperate folks are much easier to manage and manipulate.
Sure, but you have to admit that the reputation of Russians abroad is not THAT bad. They're seen as skilled at engineering and well-educated. I think Russia's future might be sunnier than many here let on - as long as they stop fighting their neighbours. By contrast, I think that the future for Israel is far grimmer. It's funny though that most of my relatives are in the intersection of these two groups: Russian Israelis - and I think my disgust towards Zionism is rooted partly in hearing them.
Russia has been a corrupt, inefficient and jealous country for at least the last 300 years or so. NATO was not necessary to continue that great tradition.
or, you know, you could provide some arguments to back what you're trying to say. But I guess we shouldn't expect that much from a 5 day old account named smalllangmodel.
They view certain components of "The West" as their enemy - indeed, the very organizations which conduct the same operations against the Russian people.
There are no enemies - they are competing parts - competing for popularity, resources, power. This makes it possible to negotiate. Enemies don't, but competitors are a lot more pragmatic.
Anglo-/Western and Russian governments have been strategic rivals for more than two centuries. Britain repeatedly sought to limit Russian expansion that threatened its own interests, such as routes to India, access to Caspian oil resources, etc.
See also, the Great Game and the Eastern Question.
They’re enemies because they want each others stuff. Russia has a LOT of stuff that the British would be quite happy to ‘manage’.
> Russia has a LOT of stuff that the British would be quite happy to ‘manage’.
And vice-versa, which results in the polite games being played, where everyone knows everyone else is doing shitty stuff to everyone, but nobody will ever admit it because that might cause the shitty stuff to descend into a shooting war, which is something we try to avoid as much as we can.
From approx 2008 on Russia has conducted operations that are in no way ideological but have only the goal to destabilize western nations. Supporting extremist parties of all orientations, magnifying events in their propaganda to maximize discord without any ideological consistency. They also quite frequently kill people on western soil. Sometimes using radioactive and chemical weapons.
Please elaborate when the west has done the same in Russia.
Just stop. The moral altitude you claim is a dire fallacy. You don’t speak Russian, or else you would already know the answer.
And I’m pretty sure you know full well that any examples given to answer your question in earnest will simply be dismissed as “Russian propaganda” - just as the Russians dismiss Western claims as propaganda, or even ‘justifiable, given Western hostilities’ - but there is a long list of actions against Russia by western powers with the intention of destabilizing Russian society, which, if you make the effort to inform yourself by reaching outside your bubble, you can see for yourself.
Russians can make just as many claims as Westerners can, and the only difference is which side one is invested in: thats what you’ll believe.
No matter what.
But, just to give you some hints as to what ‘the other side’ consider a valid response to your query, I asked some actual Russians what they would respond, and here’s the list:
- Assassinations: Daria Dugina, Igor Kirilov, Mikail Shatsky, (and BTW, Russians can quite confidently claim that the Salisbury Novichok incident was a false flag intended to harm Russian standing in the world - “Russians aren’t the only ones who synthesized Novichok…”)
- Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty: 100% anti-Russian propaganda,
- The blatant censorship of RT in Western markets (although the Russians still have access to BBC and CNN, which they also view as state-sponsored anti-Russian propaganda organs),
- Emphasis on high military casualties (sometimes highlighting disproportionate impact on ethnic minorities from poorer regions),
- Coverage of economic costs, elite corruption, and contrasts between official narratives and frontline realities,
- Support for (or amplification of) Russian opposition voices in exile and independent media,
- The "UMBRAGE" Component of Vault 7, described by Wikileaks as an offensive Western intelligence/propaganda operation against Russia,
These operations are reciprocal. Both sides do it to each other, and you are foolish to deny it.
Otherwise .. I hope you learn to speak Russian and will start paying better attention to ‘the other side’, because that’s the only way you’ll get an answer to your question, legitimately. And even then, I doubt you’ll “believe it”, since we in the West live in a very, very tightly controlled propaganda bubble, to the tune of billions of dollars a year, which absolutely prevents any such sympathies for Russia from being expressed.
Our bubble is just like the Russian bubble, only its not in Russian.
One main difference is that those examples you brought up are ideological propaganda. RFE/RL try to amplify their message and yes, the current Russian regime is very antithetical to that message. Russian propaganda is not ideological, it tries to maximize the damage to western nations and uses whatever political and ideological message that will achieve that. They have been doing that for decades, which is something a hostile nation does.
As for the assassinations, those are wartime actions by Ukraine. Not sure how they are supposed to fit into our discussion.
As for Salisbury, so you found the story of these fitness supplement salesmen convincing?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okrdqM6hNrI
It has been my impression that not even Russia tries to push that narrative any more.
> those examples you brought up are ideological propaganda
These are the examples they were able to identify. And many of them could be so obviously identified because of ideological component.
The alleged censorship of RT is more a counter-propaganda move: RT is a Russian vehicle that engages in a number of psychological warfare ops.
And, BTW, the only thing Western countries have not done in Russia is assassinations with chemical or radiological weapons, possibly due to superior counter intelligence ops on Russia’s side. And because being identified was not in their best interest - unlike Russia, which is more easily identifiable up to recent times. At this point I am not sure how much destabilisation of the EU and NATO is coming from the US instead of Russia and China, which tended to be the usual suspects.
These days anyone can run a competent disinformation warfare campaign.
Ideology? Yes, pure hatred is ideological - no matter which side of the dialectic you choose to align yourself.
“American propaganda is not ideological, it tries to maximize the damage to Russia and uses whatever political and ideological message that will achieve that.”
Huh, what do you know, that can be “true” as well. And the US and its allies have been hostile towards Russia - actually, for centuries now.
I don’t find anything about Salisbury convincing - not the British investigations, nor the Russian ones.
And the reason for that is, the evidence presented never holds up in an open, public, liberal democratic court of law - instead, the ideological propaganda that “Russians are assholes because they kill people” is propagated in the court of public opinion, which is as vicious and banal as you can possibly imagine (or else we wouldn’t need courts in the first place), no matter whether you attempt to argue from the Russian or Western perspective.
Besides which, the moral altitude claimed “against” Russia by the West is simply a fallacy - you think we don’t murder people extrajudicially?
I’ve got an ideological point for you: dropping one bomb every 15 minutes for 26 years, mostly on innocent children, women, and men is wrong and should be stopped. Any state which attempts to stop that, gets my vote - but it is not going to be stopped by any state. It is going to be stopped by the criminal states’ citizen body, which is - as we see bright and clear today - completely and utterly distracted by the hatespew against the citizens of other states, intentionally, by the people dropping the bombs - because they also own and control the means by which ideological propaganda such as “hate Russia” or “hate the West” is propagated, and they use it to expand the market for their weapons production...
In short, you’re no better than any “Russian”, and neither am I. Our nations are murderous, criminal enterprises which produce mass murder at far, far greater scales than anything a trash can in Salisbury can produce.
So you are saying Germany and the UK have no right to see Russia killing people on their soil as hostile act because the US drops some bombs in the middle east?
The history is far more banal and less nefarious than you give it credit. Nobody gave a fuck about Russia. Russia was a self limited kleptocracy and everybody just ignored it because nobody needed the headache. That is why the reaction to the land grab in Georgia and later Crimea was pretty muted and everybody just hoped that Putin would be sated and ride into the sunset as great leader who took Crimea home into the motherland.
But he wants an empire, and an empire can not be an empire if nobody cares. So he overplayed his hand to sate his vanity. One of his first public announcements after the invasion was: "I hope I am now being heard.."
Well, the World heard and now it is raining oil in Moscow and the Russian provinces are getting depopulated.
I think that Germany and the UK have all the rights they need to prosecute the criminals that have committed crimes on their territory, and doing so openly and democratically is the right kind of justice.
But these incidents do not automatically give cause to hate the entire Russian nation any more than, say, the actions of the IDF and the Israeli government should be used to justify hatred of all Jews, everywhere.
Obviously, they shouldn’t.
> Nobody gave a fuck about Russia.
This is so untrue. Western empires have been trying to balkanize Russia and colonize its resources, aggressively - since the 1800’s up until the modern era. Russia has been demonized for centuries so that Western powers can have a justification for their war industries.
See, this is the problem with the lack of proper history education in the West. You can’t get your bearings from the History Channel alone.
And then, there is international law. Do you really think the US and its allies are law-abiding members of the international community, given the grand litany of human rights abuses, war crimes, and crimes against humanity that have been committed this century alone?
One bomb dropped every 15 minutes on an innocent life, for 26 years, does not give those next in line in the Western targeting sights much hope for peace. While Americans and other Western citizens (including Germans and Brits) are utterly myopic about this, the rest of the world are really not. The crimes against humanity committed by the 5-eyes states alone, far exceed anything that Russia has done thus far. By a huge, huge margin.
> “depopulated”
See also, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Pakistan, Palestine ..
Wake me up when you start demanding justice for the war crimes of Mosul with the same ferocious tenacity as you call for Putins’ ears on the table.
This is the same nonsense many people screaming “antisemitism“ pull. Their comments are clearly about the Russian government with Putin at its head, the decisions the regime makes. They are clearly not talking about “the average Russian.” At no point has anyone mistaken your critiques of the US government for hatred of every American despite your use of “the US,” so why would you respond like that?
Don’t resort to such cheap tactics just to make a point online.
