The EU’s 21st sanctions package against Russia surprisingly targeted Russian-American travel blogger Alexandra Jost, more popularly known as “Sasha Meets Russia”, who they accuse of “spreading Russian propaganda and disinformation aimed at justifying Russia’s armed aggression against Ukraine.” While it’s true that she espouses what are considered in Russia to be patriotic views but are smeared as the aforesaid by the West, the bulk of her videos are about Russian cities and nature, not political issues.
To be sure, it was previously reported that she received funding from public entities, but they clearly don’t control her content even if that’s true as any honest observer would conclude after consuming it. Sasha speaks from the heart; she doesn’t read from a script. Moreover, her patriotic opinions are par for the course and aren’t anything exceptional, with all due respect to her. Quite clearly, even if she is indeed publicly funded, it’s for her travel blogs and not for sharing her political views on social media.
Sasha only has a moderate following too, with 66k followers on X and 9k on twitter, so it’s not like her occasionally shared political views are significantly reshaping the Western discourse. Her only moderate contribution thereto is showing that Russia isn’t a barren wasteland full of starving alcoholics like average Westerners might imagine due to the incessant propaganda that they’re exposed to about it. This isn’t political in itself, however, but some people might change their political views afterwards.
After all, realizing that one has been lied to by their elites about something for so long might naturally make them question whatever else they’ve been told and hitherto took for granted, but not many people are brave enough to undertake such retrospection and reconsider their worldview. That’s not just because they’re weak, though quite a few are, but also because peer pressure from family and friends alike usually keeps such folks in line since ruining such close relationships over politics can be painful.
For this reason, it’s a gross overreaction for the Eurocrats to sanction Sasha, which thus shows how insecure they are. They have a pathological fear of their people finding out that they’re being lied to about Russia, not even about the Ukrainian Conflict that Sasha only occasionally covers in her videos, but about average Russians and what Russia is like 4.5 years after the world’s largest number of sanctions were imposed against it. A minority of them, as explained, might then change their political views.
Sasha’s travel blogs aren’t going to spark a political revolution in Europe, and the Eurocrats know this, but they still feel very uncomfortable with someone systematically debunking their lies about everyday life in Russia. Instead of simply ignoring her, they unwittingly replicated the Streisand effect by drawing more attention to her than ever through their efforts to intimidate her. She’s now a free speech martyr whose content will thenceforth always be political to a degree even when she’s only talking about travel.
What therefore unfolded was a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby the insecure Eurocrats turned Sasha into the political force that she hitherto wasn’t due to how desperately they wanted to intimidate her. They couldn’t tolerate someone showing fellow Westerners that they’ve been lied to about Russia so they grossly overreacted, sanctioned her, and thus inadvertently turned her into a free speech martyr. They’ll certainly come to rue this decision, but their egos will likely prevent them from ever reversing it.
