A new "documentary" cycle by the British BBC under the flashy title “Putin vs the West” is an extremely telltale example of media manipulation. Vividly and fully, it reveals the tools and the methods used by Western (British, as its epitome) propaganda, weaponised in the fight for the minds and hearts of the people on our planet. Based on a seemingly evidence-based and plausible sequence of events and accompanied by high-quality videos and quotes from Western “authorities,” they proceed to create a distorted semantic series which is literally turned upside down.
The people behind this undeniably fascinating feature television series were clear about the task at hand. It was to fend off, to the best of their ability (and imagination), Russia’s arguments, which most countries consider fair, that the West has for decades been following a path of deepening confrontation with our country. After all, our opponents ignored Russia’s proposals to implement the principle of indivisible security in Europe and to build a common economic and humanitarian space from the Atlantic to the Urals. Despite Russia’s objections, they stubbornly continued to expand NATO and to systematically move NATO’s defence potential to our borders. They busily engaged in social engineering in the countries neighbouring Russia and contributed to regime changes to put in anti-Russian governments that were openly hostile to our country. Finally, they moved swiftly to turn fraternal Ukraine and its leaders into a hotbed of neo-Nazi and Russophobic ideology, an outpost of Western militarism and a proxy player flush with Western money and weapons which is destroying (Kiev officials admit it) their country for the sake of realising Washington and London’s strategic goals.
The viewers will not see or hear that in the film, though. They will not be told about the motives that prompted the United States and the EU to ignore the policy of ethnic discrimination against Russians in the Baltic States for decades, which emboldened the Kiev regime as it proceeded to suppress the rights of the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine, and then to the physically destroy “subhumans” in Donbass. They will never mention the fact that high-ranking “visitors” from the White House and Brussels were present at the Kiev Maidan protests in the winter of 2013. The anti-constitutional coup in Ukraine was orchestrated with their blessing and generous financial backing. They will protect the viewership from unpleasant scenes of barbarous shelling of Donbass by the Kiev military and their henchmen, or torchlight processions of Ukrainian Nazis in the streets of Kiev. These aspects, which are extremely inconvenient for the “enlightened” West, are carefully sidestepped in the film.
The British television series is full of multiple hackneyed clichés and claims against us, including the infamous Skripal poisoning, the rupture of the INF Treaty, the tragedy of MH-17 flight, and much more. Each of these episodes is reviewed in a perfunctory, uncritical and categorical manner, without considering Russia’s arguments, which appear in the film only as a counterbalance to highlight indisputable Western versions of the events. Importantly, Russia’s point of view is either absent altogether, or is reduced to a few fragments of speeches and interviews with Russian officials taken out of context or, much more cynical, presented in the form of a primitive and utterly distorted interpretation by Western officials, many of whom (like Dalia Grybauskaite, Radoslaw Sikorski or Michael McFaul), have never made any secret of their anti-Russian prejudices.
To illustrate the methods used by the people behind the series, let's take a look at its second episode about the situation in Syria and around it. The main message has been reduced, without any grounds, to the idea that the Russian leadership led by President Putin, allegedly avoided, in every possible way, the attempts to find a common language with its Western colleagues in order to keep Bashar al-Assad in power in Syria at any cost. Amid false accusations that the Russian leadership was disingenuous in its intentions, numerous statements and initiatives advanced by Moscow were ignored at a time where they were aimed at preventing a scenario involving a violent overthrow of the Syrian president, which would inevitably plunge the country into chaos, as the international community had the chance to see for itself in Iraq and then Libya. The critically important initiative put forward by the Astana format participants about forming a Constitutional Committee with the task of putting together proposals to amend Syria’s fundamental law, was not covered in the film, either. The key points from the interview by Russian Ambassador to the UK Andrey Kelin, who provided a detailed account of our country’s stance, were not included in the series either for reasons that are unknown to us.
In contrast, the Westerners’ obvious involvement in unleashing a civil war in Syria is hushed up. Their attempts to overthrow Bashar al-Assad are cast as “democratisation” of the country. Not a word was said about the support provided by London and its allies to the pseudo-humanitarian White Helmets volunteer organisation, which was directly responsible for mounting a number of provocations with the use of chemical weapons in Syria, including the tragedy in Eastern Ghouta (August 2013) that is mentioned in the film, with the aim of discrediting the Syrian and Russian governments. Finally, while criticising Moscow for alleged numerous civilian casualties during the operation to liberate Aleppo, the authors chose to simply “forget” about the really ruthless bombing of Syrian Raqqa by the United States, Great Britain and France in 2017, during which the city with a population of 300,000 was literally wiped off the face of the earth.
In general, the soothing repetition of headlines that have become a staple for the Western media, which testify to Moscow's alleged implication in high-profile events of the recent past, pushed the most important aspect of the situation to the background. This is an actual analysis of the causes of the current destabilisation of the military-political situation in Europe, due to the Western countries’ destructive policy and total ignorance of Russia’s concerns and interests. The “trees” have been planted by the authors in such a way that no one will be able to see the “forest” behind them.
It appears that the proposals regarding security guarantees that our country put forward in late 2021 are barely covered in the film for the same reason. Our demands to stop the admission of new members, including Ukraine, to NATO, to reinstate the status quo of 1997 in terms of forces and armaments in new NATO countries, and to abandon military activities and the deployment of ground-based intermediate and shorter-range missiles in the regions adjacent to Russia, do not appear to be anything out-of-this-world if we want to preserve stability throughout the Euro-Atlantic space. However, our serious proposals were not presented in the film in any way.
As a result, what we are left with is, once again, a pile of disparate and tired anti-Russian lampoons rather than an attempt to analyse the root causes of the security crisis in Europe, the origins of which go back to the late 1990s-early 2000s. Let's put it bluntly, they didn’t manage to objectively cover the aggravation of Russia's relations with the West, which is what the filmmakers themselves had declared as their task.
Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p0dlz7gc/putin-vs-the-west
