DISINFO: Western criticism of the Duma election is part of a hybrid war against Russia
SUMMARY
The West doesn’t care about the reality of the Russian Parliamentarian election, it sees it as a tool to legitimate further attacks against Russia under the pretext that ‘Putin is a dictator, there are no free elections, people are oppressed’. In this strategy, it has the assistance of bodies like OSCE or the Council of Europe, sadly infamous for prefabricating reports before elections in other countries to promote certain political interests. They are a tool at the service of the West, falsifying the results of an election at the convenience of Washington, NATO and the EU.
This situation can be framed inside the hybrid war carried out against Russia to force it into a situation of further weakness and to accept what the US and the EU want. We are seeing it with economic sanctions for a long time, but also with smearing, propaganda and the creation of fake news such as the Navalny and Skripal cases.
RESPONSE
Disinformation claims that appeared in the context of Russian State Duma election 2021.
The European Union took note of independent and reliable sources reporting serious violations in Russian State Duma, regional and local elections 2021 and expressed deep concerns over the continuous pattern of shrinking space for the opposition, civil society and independent voices across Russia. The EU called on Russia’s leadership to reverse these negative developments.
The Council of the European Union issued, on September 20 2021, a Declaration on the elections to the State Duma of Russia stating the following.
”The European Union regrets that Russia’s decision to severely restrict the size and format of an international OSCE/ODIHR Election Observation Mission prevented its deployment”.
The OSCE made a decision not to send observers to monitor the Duma elections because Russian authorities had limited the number of observers it could send to the elections. Matteo Mecacci, Director of OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, (ODIHR) commented on the matter as follows:
"We very much regret that our observation of the forthcoming elections in Russia will not be possible, but the ability to independently determine the number of observers necessary for us to observe effectively and credibly is essential to all international observation. The insistence of the Russian authorities on limiting the number of observers we could send without any clear pandemic-related restrictions has unfortunately made today’s step unavoidable".
Russian authorities cited the sanitary-epidemiological situation in the Russian Federation as the reason for the limitations. The OSCE said that no pandemic-related entry restrictions or rules about operating and moving within the country would seem to prevent the deployment of a full election observation mission in line with ODIHR’s initial assessment.
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the OSCE/ODIHR has been able to successfully deploy several Election Observation Missions to other countries in a manner that respected the need to prevent the spread of the virus, protecting the observers’ and host countries’ public health.
Framing external criticism as “pressure”, “attacks”, “interference” or “hybrid war” is a frequent pro-Kremlin disinformation technique, aiming to deflect any responsibility for the illicit actions of Russian authorities. In this case, this narrative is preventively applied to negative reports about the lack of democratic quality of the Duma election by EU authorities and OSCE officials, baselessly accusing them without evidence of “prefabricating reports”.
See other examples of similar disinformation narratives, such as claims that the West is conducting a hybrid war aimed at undermining Russia’s role and influence in Eurasia, that the West uses Russian protest movements as the fifth column to destabilise Russia, that the US failed to discredit the Russian electoral system, that ODIHR has no criteria of assessment and the West itself has no fair elections, or that London accuses Russia of crimes without ever presenting evidence.
This disinformation message appeared in the same article as the claim that “European Parliament must have a crystal ball: it called beforehand not to recognise Duma election”.