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The Russian state press has taken out of context a statement by the former US Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, and have disseminated a propaganda narrative, according to which American scholars support Putin's ideas about Ukraine. In reality, McFaul presented several opinion trends from the US and around the world on the history of Ukraine, and not on the current Russian-Ukrainian war.
NEWS: “McFaul talked about the fact that Putin’s statements about the unity between the Russian and the Ukrainian peoples are supported by many scholars in the US.
Former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul has stated that many Americans, including scholars, support Russian President Vladimir Putin's words about the historical unity of Russia and Ukraine. He said that in an interview with the online publication “Ukrainska Pravda” on July 14.
“There are many people in the US who share some of Putin’s statements about Ukraine: Russians, Ukrainians, are all the same, right? Their languages are practically the same language, right?”, he said.
[...]
The Russian leader has stressed on several occasions the importance of Russian language for the countries neighboring the Russian Federation. In the article headlined “On the historical union of Russians and Ukrainians”, published in July 2021, Putin said that the new leadership of Ukraine, which took over power in Kyiv after the 2014 coup, tried to erase everything that had kept Ukrainians and Russians together.
[...]
Putin called modern Ukraine entirely a creation of the Soviet era, consisting largely of historical Russian territories.”
NARRATIVE: US scholars support Putin’s ideas about Ukraine.
WHY THE NARRATIVE IS FALSE: Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the Russian media has increasingly resorted to manipulating the public opinion by intentionally misrepresenting headlines. Most Russian publications and Telegram channels (News.ru, Gazeta.ru etc.) have written that the former American ambassador has admitted for the first time that US scholars agree with Vladimir Putin's ideas regarding Ukraine.
At first reading, one gets the impression that American intellectuals support all actions, including the military ones, carried out by Russia on the territory of Ukraine. In the next paragraph of the text, it is specified that it is about the idea of the unity of Russia and Ukraine, and it is only in the middle of the news that mention is made of the fact that the talk is actually about history, not the current state of affairs! The uninformed reader is left with the idea that American scholars support Putin, as opposed to the political environment in Washington that supports Ukraine.
The statement of the former American ambassador to Moscow was taken out of context and presented in a context favorable to Russian propaganda. Michael McFaul, in an interview with Ukrainian media, said quite the opposite, namely that the historical truth is known in Washington, and criticized some scholars from around the world who are dominated by Soviet stereotypes . “The Soviet Union is gone, but, what seems dangerous to me is that Russian imperial narratives have not disappeared”.
The former diplomat said that “a program to reeducate the world about Ukrainian history and Russian history should be developed, so that these myths be finally dispelled and people will know the true history of Ukraine”. By not presenting these fragments of the interview with Michael McFaul, the Russian press totally distorted the content of the initial information.
Also, the Russian media recalled a string of false narratives debunked by Veridica over the past year: the 2014 coup in Kyiv , Ukraine – a false state, created by the USSR, the Ukrainian language – a made-up language .
On July 12, 2021, an article signed by Vladimir Putin was published on the Kremlin’s website, entitled “On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians”. The disinformation narratives that circulated after this article were very much in line with the political theses of the Kremlin leader. The article repeats the false narrative about Ukraine as a “false state”. Europeanized Ukraine is for Putin an anti-Russia, which the Russian president wants to combat in his article. Vladimir Putin believes that Russians and Ukrainians are historically close, and the Ukrainian state emerged at the initiative of the former Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin.
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