By Brian Whitmore, The Daily Vertical
The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect the views of RFE/RL.
So have you heard? NATO is recruiting Russian speakers in Latvia to use as guinea pigs for psychological and biological experiments.
German soldiers are assaulting women in Lithuania. And troops from the Western alliance are apparently taking LSD to prepare for an invasion of Russia.
What? You haven’t heard these things?
Well you would have learned all about them had you been reading the Russian-language media in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
Welcome to the weird, weird world of the Kremlin’s active measures and disinformation in the Baltics.
As thousands of American, British, Canadian, and German troops deploy on NATO’s eastern frontier in an effort to bolster the security of Poland and the Baltic states, the Kremlin is turning the volume on its propaganda machine all the way up to 11.
According to Martins Kaprans of the Center for European Policy Analysis, Moscow is using a “digital archipelago” of pro-Kremlin websites to attack NATO on a daily basis.
And sure, the claims are implausible, over the top, and quite frankly pretty ridiculous.
And no, they are not going to convince most people, or even most Russian-speakers.
But here’s the thing. They don’t need to convince most people.
They just need to get enough people fearful and riled-up enough to spark an incident and provoke a crisis down the road, whenever it suits the Kremlin’s purposes.
So yeah, the Kremlin’s anti-NATO propaganda effort in the Baltics is indeed absurd.
But as we learned from Russia’s disinformation campaign in Ukraine, absurdity can also be deadly.
By Brian Whitmore, The Daily Vertical
