Leonid Ragozin is a contract journalist based mostly in Riga.
RIGA — As Donald Trump supporters went on a rampage by means of the Capitol, you’ll be forgiven for assuming that Russian President Vladimir Putin was watching occasions unfold and rubbing his arms with glee.
In any case, the chaos, confusion and destruction on show could possibly be seen because the end result of the Kremlin’s long-running efforts to undermine American democracy.
However in Moscow, and amongst Putin’s supporters, the response was subdued, as state propagandists sought to tread a skinny line: Profiting from the prime alternative to troll America, whereas avoiding encouraging related unrest in their very own nation.
There was, predictably, a good bit of schadenfreude. “American democracy is limping on each legs,” Konstantin Kosachev, a international coverage bigwig on the higher chamber of the Russian parliament, wrote on Fb. The U.S., he stated, “has misplaced its skill to constitution its personal course and due to this fact to set the course for others.”
Comparisons have been additionally drawn to the 2014 revolution in Ukraine that ousted President Viktor Yanukovych and prompted Putin to annex Crimea. Recalling an episode the place then Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland handed out cookies to protesters in central Kyiv, Kosachev requested what People would make of international officers doing the identical to Trump supporters on the steps of the Capitol. Would they nonetheless say “the individuals are all the time proper” or “down with the usurpers,” he mused.
The audience of this line of pondering is, in fact, home. The objective is to show the obvious duplicity of the American political institution, which supported the Euromaidan revolution in 2014, turning a blind eye to the far-right radicals who performed a job, however branded the Trump followers who sought to overturn the results of the U.S. presidential election as “criminals and terrorists.”
This equivalence, promoted by Kremlin propaganda, between Trump supporters’ failed rebellion and the Ukrainian revolution is fake — an effort to play up the narrative of Euromaidan as a U.S.-backed fascist coup that warranted Russian intervention.
But if the Kremlin is taking some pleasure in America’s misfortune, the scenes of violent chaos in Washington are additionally its worst nightmare.
Putin is famously paranoid about “shade revolutions,” such because the one which swept Ukraine. It’s the essential driver of his international and home coverage. In Washington, he’ll have seen proof {that a} celebration’s — or political chief’s — fringe, far-right supporters can strike out on their very own and spark chaos and dysfunction.
Over the previous 20 years, Putin has courted ultranationalist teams and thinkers and included facets of recent far-right ideology into his platform, together with the rhetoric of “conventional Christian values” and anti-LGBTQ stances, with a purpose to safe their assist. However this assist has all the time been tenuous.
A lot of distinguished far-right figures joined the anti-government Bolotnaya Sq. protests in 2011 and 2012. The revolution in Ukraine confirmed Putin’s fears: There, he noticed that the far proper might type extremely environment friendly militias able to tipping the scales in occasions of volatility and dysfunction. A serious crackdown adopted, and distinguished Russian far-right figures have been arrested or compelled to flee to Ukraine the place they joined nationalist volunteer models such because the Azov battalion.
Even those that supported Putin, becoming a member of Russian-backed forces in Donbas, have been handled with suspicion, within the information that the alliance between the Kremlin and the far proper hinges on quite a few circumstances and is under no circumstances unbreakable. Igor Girkin, a rogue Russian mercenary lively in Japanese Ukraine, famously referred to Putin as an “American whore” in a 2017 interview.
Reacting to occasions in Washington final week, right-wing thinker Dmitry Olshansky — one other die-hard supporter of Putin’s warfare in opposition to Ukraine — wrote that “folks with horns and painted faces” contained in the Capitol have been in truth defending core Western values in opposition to the “Soviet caliphate.” The Kremlin’s schadenfreunde, he stated, was untimely, warning that related scenes might simply as nicely happen in Russia.
Extremely-nationalists and neo-Nazis who’ve fled Russia, unrestrained by worry of prosecution, have been much more outspoken of their assist of the American extremists’ actions. “Fashington has been seized,” Wotanjugend, a neo-Nazi platform run by fugitive Russians out of Ukraine, exclaimed.
The U.S., finally, isn’t alone in contending with a surge in far-right extremism that thrives on political upheaval and goals of armed battle. Like Trump, Putin has sought to leverage their anger to their very own benefit. And like Trump, he’s hardly answerable for the menace he helped to unleash.
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