Putin bribing his main supporters and controlling what Russians hear about the war in Ukraine

If Putin thought that his recent threats or that his attempted deflection of the eyes of the EU and the US away from Ukraine and towards the Middle East and ISIS was working, he must have been somewhat disappointed now that EU ambassadors have decided to keep the current round of sanctions against Russia in place.

"The EU is to keep sanctions against Russia in place, judging that Ukraine's peace deal is not fully effective.

EU ambassadors who met on Tuesday had noted some "encouraging developments" since the 5 September ceasefire was agreed, an EU spokeswoman said. But other parts of the peace deal "will need to be properly implemented", said the spokeswoman, Maja Kocijancic." (BBC News 30 September 2014)

Adding to his woes, the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) to Ukraine will be supplying Ukraine with drones as an additional monitoring instrument. (October 1st 2014)

Even the economy is having severe problems, with the Russian government unwilling to face up to this reality, as reported in the Economist. (30 September 2014)

"TODAY  Russia submitted its budget to the Duma, the lower house of the parliament. After three rounds of discussions, Vladimir Putin, the president, will sign it into law. The budget shows how much trouble the Russian economy is in—and how unwilling the government is to face up to reality. ......The budget looks like a desperate attempt by the Kremlin to project strength and maintain public support, when in fact it is looking ever weaker."

"The budget sees slower public wage increases, but nonetheless allocates 57 percent of its spending to social causes, chiefly supporting Putin's main electorate — pensioners and state sector employees." (Moscow Times)

But will Putin's blatant bribing of pensioners and state sector employees still the growing voices of despair amongst Russia's wives and mothers who have lost husbands and sons in his war against Ukraine?

 

 

As Corey Flintoff has reported,

"Valentina Melnikova, the head of the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers, an organization representing the troops' families, said in an interview with the independent TV channel Rain that there are reports that families have been told to keep quiet about the losses of their loved ones in the service."

But how much longer can Putin sustain the lie that," ...  Russian soldiers are part of the battle — though they are ...... volunteers, on leave from their army jobs", even in the face of  " [t]he Russian TV channel NTV [carrying] a report on the funerals of two Russian paratroopers who were killed while fighting in Ukraine", and who were buried with full military honours? (Corey Flintoff)

If this does not indicate Putin's contempt for the Russian people, as does his previous go-ahead to the FSB to blow up those flats in Russian cities in 1999 that killed hundreds of Russians, then I fail to see what else can. Putin should be made aware of the truism that:

You can fool ALL of the people SOME to the time,

SOME of the people ALL of the time,

But NOT all of the people ALL of the time.

 

That Putin is under the delusion that he can fool all of the people all of the time is indicated by him and his Security Council embarking to-day (1st October 2014) on a discussion about how to counteract "threats to national security in the information sphere", as reported by Itar Tass, the Russian News Agency.

This is why more than 2000 websites have been closed in Russia over the past two years.

But unfortunately for him, railing against the internet as a CIA tool unleashed by the US upon the world rather displays his ignorance about about the actual origins of the internet. What it does display, however, is that the Kremlin is turning more and more to conspiracy theory as a "major tool" with which to manage its own people, as Vladimir Zhirinovsky has suggested it should do. What is very sad is that this is being done over the dead bodies of Russians and Ukrainians.

Putin may be in a powerful position to bribe the Russian people to believe in his narratives about Ukraine, and to control what the Russian people hear about his invasion of Ukraine, but there is still the rest of the world. Putin is throwing millions of dollars into his global TV propaganda machine, RT (Russia Today). As Benjamin Bidder of Der Spiegel points out:

"Since 2005, the Russian government has increased the channel's annual budget more than tenfold, from $30 million (€22.6 million) to over $300 million. Russia Today's budget covers the salaries of 2,500 employees and contractors worldwide, 100 in Washington alone. And the channel has no budget cuts to fear now that Putin has issued a decree forbidding his finance minister from taking any such steps."(my emphasis)

RT Headquarters in Moscow

True to the proposal of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, "Russia Today also uses a chaotic mixture of conspiracy theories and crude propaganda [with which to manage its global audience]. On the program "The Truthseeker," the attack on the Boston Marathon, in which two ethnic Chechens killed three people with bombs in April, mutated into a US government conspiracy" (Benjamin Bidder)

But even more disconcerting is the fact that Sergey Lavrov, that Soviet dyed-in-the-wool Foreign Minister of Russia, is doing precisely what Zhirinovsky has suggested.

"Russia’s foreign minister [Lavrov] said on Wednesday that 400 bodies had been found in mass graves in eastern Ukraine but the claim looked highly contentious after it emerged that reports from the scene had been distorted by Russian media", as reported from Moscow by Tom Parfitt  (1st October 2014)"

“This is obviously a war crime,” Sergei Lavrov told a press conference in Moscow. “Already more than 400 bodies have been discovered in burial sites outside Donetsk and we hope that western capitals will not hush up these facts [because] they’re horrific.”

Unfortunately for Lavrov, one of Putin's proxies in Donetsk,  Andrei Purgin, had to correct him.

"Andrei Purgin, a senior rebel leader, said that only nine bodies had been discovered, not 400. “We were misunderstood,” he said, according to Interfax. We were speaking about the fact that 400 is the overall number of unidentified bodies in Donetsk morgues, 90% of whom are civilians who died at different times.”

What Putin and his clique seem to be quite oblivous about is that the global audience has access to a wide range of  different perspectives about the current war between Ukraine and Russia. Furthermore, Putin and his clique cannot control what the global audience reads or views. Thus the global audience has viewed the recent toppling of Lenin's statue in Kharkiv.

Toppling Lenin's statue in Kharkiv

The toppling of Lenin statues has happened throughout Ukraine. (Rick Noack). And the whole world knows about it, and why the Ukrainian people have done this. RT may give its 'Putin spin' about this event but, yet again, the  'false' Putin propaganda-narrative simply shines through, as in the case of the Boston Marathon bombings.

(to be continued)