DISINFO: The National Interest explained why the US should side with Russia in the situation with Ukraine
SUMMARY
The National Interest explained why the US should side with Russia in the situation with Ukraine. As expert Ted Carpenter pointed in the publication, US officials like to portray this state as an audacious democracy that suffers the aggression of “authoritarian Russia”. However, this idealised image never fit reality. Carpenter thinks that Ukraine shouldn’t be seen as an important and useful partner in the security field, since this doesn’t contribute to the purchase of real foreign policy goals. Besides, it only provokes Russia, which doesn’t benefit US interests at all. The author of the article believes that the “fraudulent” actions of Washington could be seen even during the Obama Administration, which supported the Maidan in 2014.
RESPONSE
This disinformation story is a deliberate distortion of the original article in The National Interest which, contrary to the claim, doesn’t say that the US “should side with Russia” nor affirms that US support for Ukraine “provokes Russia”. While Ted Carpenter’s article is very critical with Ukraine’s rulers and its political situation, it actually compares its alleged authoritarian drift to what he calls “the pseudo-democratic systems of Russia, Hungary, and Turkey”. Also, unlike in the disinformation piece, the original article also uses the words ‘authoritarian Russia’ without quoting marks. Another manipulation is the sentence about Barack Obama’s support of the Maidan protests, where the original article states: “There has been a fraudulent element to Washington’s policy” since this support took place, which is very different than saying that all the actions of Washington are “fraudulent”.
Pro-Kremlin media frequently resort to this manipulative technique of quoting sentences from serious publications and then introducing a distorted message as if it was part of the original article, in this case, to promote recurrent pro-Kremlin narratives about Ukraine.
See other examples in our database, such as false claims that British outlet The Guardian pointed to ruling elite as the real instigators of the racial crisis in the US, exposed how US Democrats were exploiting irregularities in the voting system, and reported that the EU remained silent as the Europeans couldn’t buy food for the first time in 75 years; that Foreign Policy explained why Washington needs a “Russian intervention”; that The National Interest said that Russia’s Avangard missiles can devastate US defences; that Newsweek magazine revealed how the US coup in Iran will end; or that a Polish leading expert confirmed why his country should be scared of Russia’s missiles.