During his speech at the UN General Assembly’s High level Week, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov kicked off the festive season early and decorated a veritable disinformation-Christmas tree with a selection of anti-Western, anti-EU, and pro-Kremlin talking points.
Lavrov’s boss Putin could not come to New York because he is wanted for deporting Ukrainian children. Not wanting to let his underling best him in disinfo-spewing, Putin added a couple of falsehoods and distortions to the tree Lavrov set up.
Continuing the Christmas allegory: Russian disinformation narratives are like decorations brought up from the basement year after year. They hardly ever change, they are not very imaginative, and their effect is based on recognisability and repetitiveness. For each wild claim Lavrov made in his speech, we have logged hundreds of cases in our disinfo database.
Good old ‘Blame the West’ on full display
We start with the accusation that everything bad was caused by the desire of ‘the West’ to dominate the world. Lavrov mentioned this in relation to almost every topic he addressed concerning the Middle East, Ukraine, UN and UN Security Council reforms, the Indo-Pacific region, Russia’s war against Georgia, and relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
The term ‘the West’ is vague, which is convenient if you’re trying to create an imaginary enemy. The Kremlin usually uses it to describe the United States, the United Kingdom, and the EU. Russian disinformation is obsessed with plots by the United Kingdom, or the ‘Anglo-Saxons’, to influence world affairs. This notion is curiously outdated and more fitting for the time before the Second World War. In fact, even the conspiracy theory Lavrov used to substantiate this idea in his speech involves British documents from 1945.
The ‘NATO expansionism’ myth
Being responsible for everything, the West is, according to Lavrov’s speech, especially responsible for Russia’s brutal full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Firstly, it broke, according to him, the promise not to expand NATO. The idea of “NATO expansionism” is another disinfo story that Russia tries to make sound true by repeating it again and again and again. In fact, the very idea of “NATO expansion” is part of the disinformation.
Independent countries are free to exercise their sovereign rights to craft their own foreign policy and seek their own security arrangements as they see fit. This includes, should they so choose, to apply to join NATO and commit to the Alliance’s founding principles of democracy, liberty, and the rule of law. Nobody could have promised not to expand NATO because that is not how NATO works.
Goodly Russia, the protector of people
Secondly, Lavrov attempted to justify Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine by distorting the chapter of the UN Charter proclaiming the obligation to respect the self-determination of peoples. This manipulative story goes that inhabitants of temporarily occupied Ukrainian territories chose to become part of Russia and that the Ukrainian people and particularly Russian speaking population had to be protected from Ukrainian aggression.
Self-determination is of course not something that states can choose for the territories of their neighbours. It is beyond absurd to hear a Russian politician make this claim while his regime is trying very hard every day to annihilate Ukrainians, Crimean Tatars, and others for daring to exercise the very right to self-determination the Kremlin professes to hold so dear.
Old Wine in Old Wineskins
Disinfo related to the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine was also the decoration Putin himself decided to hang on Lavrov’s tree. He ‘congratulated’ inhabitants of the temporarily occupied areas of Ukraine on the ‘Day of Reunification with Russia’, and repeated the same lies about having saved them from a ‘Western-backed neo-Nazi dictatorship in Kyiv’.
In doing so Putin unveiled one of his favourite disinfo-decorations for the tree: the claim that ‘Western elites’ were preparing the Ukrainian army to attack the Russian-occupied regions of Donbas and Crimea, and that this was the reason for Russia to launch its invasion.
This lie tries to misrepresent current support for Ukrainian self-defence as the reason for Russia’s aggression. Putin’s false claims were just as repetitive as the rest of Lavrov’s speech at the UN.
Saboteurs and terrorists everywhere
Lavrov claimed that sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline was a United States plot to undermine the competitiveness of the EU. In fact the United States and the EU are close economic partners and investigations into Nord Stream are still ongoing.
He falsely accused Western countries of being responsible for global terrorism and having unleashed a war of sanctions against the majority of the countries in the world. In fact, counter-terrorism is an area on which NATO and Russia used to work together.
Western sanctions are aimed at stopping the Russian war machine from killing Ukrainian civilians, like they did during the massacre at Bucha. For this atrocity, Lavrov also blamed the West in the same speech.
The only real peace is Putin’s peace
One of the main goals of the UN is to ensure peace in the world, but there was nothing in Lavrov’s speech to indicate Russia is interested in ending its military aggression against Ukraine anytime soon. He dismissed Ukrainian peace initiatives as ‘dead-ends’ and repeated the lie that Putin’s settlement plan from June 2024 is realistic, while it merely amounts to a call for Ukrainian surrender. For the Kremlin, dismissing Ukraine’s efforts for a just and lasting peace went hand in glove with sniggering at Zelenskyy’s Victory Plan and falsely accusing Ukraine of trying to draw NATO into a direct war with Russia.
The emperor has no friends
Lavrov abused his speaking time at the UN to peddle obvious falsehoods and distortions, which could then be amplified by pro-Kremlin media and disinfo outlets. But he had another important mission in New York: to project the image that Russia has not turned itself into an increasingly isolated pariah on the international stage.
The Kremlin likes to imagine itself as a leading member of a ‘global majority’ of formerly colonised countries in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Lavrov’s remarks about the ‘neo-colonial practices’ of Western countries were likely meant to appeal to representatives of these nations.
The reality of Russia’s isolation was once again on display when its diplomats failed to stop an ambitious plan by UN Secretary-General António Guterres aimed at reviving the UN. 143 nations voted for the proposal with Russia and just six other countries voting against.
Russia – Part of Old Europe
The blunder was clearly painful for Lavrov, who mentioned it right at the beginning of his speech. He was also upset that Guterres reminded the world that Russia unjustly profits from the current set-up of the UN Security Council since there are three European permanent members of the UN Security Council and none from Africa.
Lavrov said at his own press conference that he had asked Guterres if ‘he really believed that we were in the same package with London and Paris. He said, well, what else are you?’
Falling for your own deceptions is one of the things that makes disinformation so dangerous. The targets of disinformation might or might not be influenced. But the ones spreading lies will sooner or later start to believe them. The consequences can be dire.
The shattering of the Russian ‘global majority’ disinfo-Christmas bauble at this year’s UN is a reminder of this.
Don’t be deceived!
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