Sunday Times (Sri Lanka)

Nuclear fakes: Russia challenges the NATO nations' war narrative

- By Maria Zakharova, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoma­n

Mechanisms for informatio­n attacks with a new thesis that target the public space have been launched in the West at the highest level in a transbound­ary and trans-format manner. The thesis is primitive and completely horrifying: the Russians are threatenin­g a nuclear war, and the Russians are waving the nuclear stick.

Do I even need to say that this thesis is absolutely incorrect and false? Apparently, I do.

They are pushing this exact thesis because it plays on basic human fears, the experience of the older generation, which throughout the second half of the 20th century was bracing for the Third World War against global communism, and Western youth, for which their respective government­s have come up with a new mechanism called “cancel culture” (cancelling everything Russian this time). Moreover, the West absolutely does not care what Moscow says, and the meaning of words is distorted and outwardly perverted. Let’s consider the specifics. Two days ago, in his answer to a question by Dimitri Simes during an interview, Sergey Lavrov said literally the following: “For many years, as far back as during the Donald Trump presidency, we called for Moscow and Washington to reaffirm at the highest level the 1987 statement by Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, who said that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. We tried to convince Donald Trump’s team to reaffirm this statement, considerin­g its importance for our nations and for the entire world. Unfortunat­ely, we failed to persuade our colleagues that this step was needed. However, we reached common ground with the Joe Biden administra­tion quite quickly, and our presidents issued the statement in June 2021 during their Geneva summit. In January 2022, we fulfilled another initiative to this effect. The five permanent members of the UN Security Council adopted a statement along the same lines, which was supposed to coincide with the opening of the Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferat­ion of Nuclear Weapons. All five leaders put their signatures under the statement that a nuclear war must never happen. This is our position of principle, and we are committed to it. The risks are quite high today. I would not like to see them blown out of proportion, but many would love to do it. This threat is serious and real.”

What are the takeaways?

1. It was Russia that, with great difficulty, convinced the United States during lengthy talks to reaffirm the Gorbachev-Reagan formula that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.

2. It was Russia that persuaded the group of five nuclear nations to adopt a statement with the same content.

3. There are risks; they should not be blown out of proportion or underestim­ated. We did everything possible to prevent a nuclear war, to create all the necessary obstacles on the way to slipping into this scenario (fortunatel­y, they justified themselves during the Cold War and are working today), because we understand the real risks and threats posed by irresponsi­ble behaviour in this area. We cannot allow the very thought of a nuclear war.

Acting in the worst traditions of disinforma­tion, Western officials are feeding the media, in a coordinate­d effort, fake news about Moscow’s alleged nuclear threats. The foreign ministries from the NATO countries started convincing the people in their countries that the Russians were “rattling their weapons.”

First, the media waylaid US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin in Germany and later quoted him as saying that “the

Russians are threatenin­g us with a bomb.” Then, CIA Director William Burns spoke to the same topic in Atlanta. At the same time, retirees, including former US Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, were pulled out of mothballs to continue to flood the discourse with the “Russian atomic threat.”

All of that was a warm-up to US State De p a r t m e n t Spokespers­on Ned Price calling the Russian Minister’s words “bluster” and at the same time, paradoxica­lly, positing a “potential nuclear escalation” during a briefing.

Notice how clumsy this was in terms of media work. First, all the put-up quotes against our country were repeated by the journalist­s, and then they were again mentioned by Ned Price. A presentati­on designed for a not too sophistica­ted public. No one even paid attention to what the Foreign Minister said about the risks and Russia’s attempts to prevent the unthinkabl­e.

It’s unthinkabl­e to us, but, mindful of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is, unfortunat­ely, possible for our colleagues from overseas.

The next day, the media started mass brainwashi­ng. The British tabloids (the Daily Mail and others) and the high-quality analytical US press, French television and German tabloid magazines started talking with one voice that Moscow was threatenin­g with a Third World Nuclear War. And this was already being discussed in Europe; French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said that the Russian Foreign Minister’s words were the “rhetoric of intimidati­on.”

I would like to ask this Frenchman whether he at least saw what Sergey Lavrov said? We have translated the interview.

Our country is against any nuclear war, and this is exactly what the Russian Minister said, and this is what guides our diplomacy in its work.

Could it be that the Western capitals read the interviews as presented by the Western media? This is the only thing that can justify their words. Just don’t turn off alternativ­e sources of informatio­n, and listen to what Russia has to say close to the original text, rather than as interprete­d by your media under NATO guidelines.

(Source: https://telegra.ph/ Nuclear-DisInfo-04-28)

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