Media stories in English, Russian and German equating crisis in Spain with conflicts in Crimea and Kurdistan
In
a bid to sow division within the European Union, Russia’s online
disruption machinery is working at full speed to equate the Catalan
crisis to the Crimean or Kurdish conflicts in the eyes of public
opinion.
A
detailed analysis of pro-Russian media shows that these have
multiplied their coverage of Catalonia in Spanish, English, German
and Russian, and that all of this output systematically portrays the
Spanish government and justice system as guilty of violent repression
in the northeastern region. These news organizations claim
that Madrid has sent paramilitary troops to Barcelona, and
warns that a civil war is imminent as the EU passively stands
by. The Russian media compared these events to Russia’s 2014
annexation of Crimea and the Kurdish referendum vote.
One
pro-Kremlin news organization, the daily Vzglyad, on Wednesday
wrote:
“Spain
forcibly suppresses the Catalan spring,” followed by the assertion
that “the Crimean spring has moved to the Pyrenees.”
The
basic premise of the pro-Russian disruption machinery is to create
information that is sometimes real, sometimes fake.
“We’re
not talking about Soviet propaganda or anything like that. It’s not
all fake news,” says Brett Schaffer, an analyst at the Alliance for
Securing Democracy, a project of the German Marshall Fund created in
the wake of Russian meddling in the US elections, and whose goal is
to “publicly document and expose Vladimir Putin’s ongoing efforts
to subvert democracy in the United States and Europe.”
“This
does not mean that Russia wants Catalonia to be independent at any
cost. What it fundamentally seeks is to create division, in order to
slowly undermine Europe’s democracy and institutions,” he adds.
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