Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov offended many “Non-Russian Pro-Russians” (NRPR) last week with his harsh denial of reports that his country is arming Iran against the US. In his words, “For no apparent reason, the West, and Washington in particular, are now stoking a narrative that Russia and China are directly supplying Iran with the weapons to attack US targets. Well, you know, it is embarrassing to even hear that.” He probably didn’t realize that many top NRPR influencers have been pushing the same lie.
The false narrative has been propagated by them alleging that Russia isn’t just giving targeting intelligence to Iran, the earlier reports of which were assessed here and here to be accurate despite Russian and US denials, but has also given Iran drones and missiles. Many average NRPRs have been preconditioned to believe it due to the top influencers among them lying for years that Putin is an anti-Zionist who’s secretly allied with Iran against Israel. That lie is now their community’s de facto dogma.
In their minds, Putin couldn’t be anything but since they project their dislike of Israel onto him due to believing that he always supports whatever causes they consider to be just, such as Palestine’s. Whenever they’re confronted with indisputable facts from reputable sources such as this collection of his quotes about Israel between 2000-2018 from the official Kremlin website, they dismiss it as him “playing 5D chess to psyche out the Zionists”. They can’t accept that he’s a proud lifelong philo-Semite.
After all, many top NRPR influencers have laundered this lie since the start of Russia’s anti-terrorist operation in Syria in 2015, which they falsely spun as opposing Israel despite Putin and Bibi clinching a deal in the run-up thereof for coordinating their strikes there. While Russia bombed ISIS, Israel bombed the IRGC, Hezbollah, the Syrian Arab Army, and allied militias hundreds of times, all without Russia ever intervening in their support due to its Iranian-Israeli balancing act that was explained here and here.
Making their lies even more compelling was many of these same top NRPR influencers being platformed by publicly financed Russian media, where they parroted this same lie without being fact-checked, as well as being invited to Russia for events. These developments made average NRPRs believe that those influencers were telling the truth since they couldn’t imagine the Russian state continuing to associate with people who lie about its policies, let alone never nudging them to recalibrate their takes next time.
The reality is that many of these “soft power supervisors”, or the state representatives who promote these top NRPR influencers, practice a soft power approach that can be called “Potemkinism”. This refers to the creation of alternative realities about Russian policy for “strategic purposes”, which can cynically be described as getting people to like Russia even on false premises such as believing that Putin is an anti-Zionist with all that entails. It’s still practiced despite being provably counterproductive.
With this context in mind, many NRPRs might spin Lavrov’s insult as him “playing 5D chess to psyche out the Zionists”, but that doesn’t explain why Trump confirmed that Russia isn’t arming Iran even though that lie could justify his “war of attrition” against Russia, which is now targeting civilians. Few NRPRs are likely to accept that they’ve been brainwashed by their top influencers, and the more that they cling to the cardinal lie of Putin being an anti-Zionist, the more that they discredit their community as a whole.
