Chilkat Valley News - Serving Haines and Klukwan, Alaska since 1966

There was a derogatory name leveled at people during the Cold War who were unwittingly influenced by the Soviet Union: useful idiots.

Russian president Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine two weeks ago citing as one of his goals the “denazification” of the country. About a week later, a sign mysteriously appeared overnight in Haines with the slogan “Russia Denazify Ukraine” (see back page) next to a Ukrainian flag erected by Becky Nash who encouraged residents to pray for the people of Ukraine.

I’m not opposed to someone erecting signs I disagree with, but whoever made those signs should seriously question how they’re being informed and why they’re parroting Russian propaganda on the streets of Haines.

Putin and the Kremlin have attempted to justify their invasion by peddling baseless claims at home and abroad that Ukraine is run by Nazis who are committing genocide. Even though there is no evidence of ethnic cleansing in Ukraine, which, by the way, has a Jewish president, it shouldn’t surprise us that Putin’s lies have found their way to Haines.

Putin and the Kremlin have long used similar propaganda in Ukraine and other Baltic states and they have a penchant for sowing division and chaos in countries they are at odds with, including the U.S. In April 2018, Russian state-owned news stations, Sputnik News and Zvezda, aired a since-debunked story that Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” was more popular than Harry Potter in Latvia.

The Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm, is infamous for organizing dozens of political rallies and protests in the U.S. by exploiting our social divisions along race, religion and other cultural dividing lines, all in an effort to create chaos and weaken our country from within.

A 2016 RAND Corporation report titled “The Russian ‘Firehose of Falsehood’ Propaganda Model” describes the Russian government’s propaganda model as continuous, repetitive and that it lacks a commitment to consistency and objective reality.

“In some ways, the current Russian approach to propaganda builds on Soviet Cold War-era techniques, with an emphasis on obfuscation and on getting targets to act in the interests of the propagandist without realizing they have done so,” wrote the authors from the American global policy think tank. “In other ways, it is completely new and driven by the characteristics of the contemporary information environment.”

Messages are presented via text, audio, still imagery and propagated via the internet, social media, satellite television and traditional radio and television broadcasting.

Paid internet “trolls” are among the producers and disseminators of such content who often attack or undermine views “that run counter to Russian themes, doing so through online chat rooms, discussion forums and comment sections on news and other websites.”

“Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports that ‘there are thousands of fake accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and vKontakte’ (Russia’s version of Facebook) maintained by Russian propagandists," the authors wrote. “According to a former paid Russian internet troll, the trolls are on duty 24 hours a day, in 12-hour shifts, and each has a daily quota of 135 posted comments of at least 200 characters.”

Millions of Ukrainians are fleeing the country not because of Nazis, but because of Putin. Those not fleeing are fighting, and fighting much harder than Putin, the self-styled liberator, apparently thought they would.