Ukraine has returned to Russia, and “a new world is being born before our eyes”. This is what an article published last Saturday (26) by the RIA news agency, linked to the Kremlin, said as a kind of celebration of Moscow’s supposed victory in the clashes that have dragged on since the beginning of the war against the neighboring country.
There are indications that the text was published by mistake, as it is no longer available on the agency’s website. The material, however, did not go unnoticed by the Internet Archive organization, which managed to capture the screen of the publication and made it available on the WayBack Machine (a platform that allows users to visit old versions of internet pages).
Signed by journalist Petr Akopov, the text tries to convince the reader that the existence of Ukraine is inseparable from Russian history, a narrative frequently used by Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Russia is restoring its unity – the 1991 tragedy [quando a União Soviética chegou ao fim]this terrible catastrophe in our history, its unnatural displacement, has been overcome,” he wrote.
Still in line with the Ukrainians and Russians being “one people”, as the Kremlin chief has also written, the journalist regrets that this “new era” has come at great cost. “Brothers, separated as they belong to the Russian and Ukrainian armies, continue to shoot each other.” The author also claims that with the imagined victory of Moscow, there will be no more anti-Russian sentiment in the neighboring country.
“Russia is restoring its historical fullness, bringing together the Russian world, the Russian people – in its totality of great Russians, Belarusians and little Russians,” he celebrated, citing the names of those people who were born in Russia, in Belarus. and Ukraine, respectively, when the three countries were part of the Russian empire.
The historical narrative used by the author is already known, but the hasty publication of the article may have advanced some of Putin’s plans for the Ukrainians, as well as new steps in the geopolitical relations of the Kremlin. Although he celebrated the fact that Ukraine returned to Russia, the journalist stressed that “this does not mean that your state will be liquidated, but it will be reorganized, re-established and returned to its natural state in part of the Russian world”.
The details of this process are left open by the author, but one thing is certain, according to him: the supposed Russian victory in the confrontation would show the rest of the world that “the era of Western global domination can be considered completely and definitively ended”. In that case, the new world order would be “built by all civilizations and the center of power, together with the West (united or not). But not on its terms and not according to its rules”.
The deterioration of relations between Russia and Western powers had already been highlighted last Friday (25) by the spokeswoman for Russian diplomacy, Maria Zajarov. According to her, “the fact is that we are close to the moment when the point of no return begins.”
The publication of the RIA has yet another meaning, this one of a more symbolic nature: state propaganda and the escalation of false news disseminated by information channels linked to the Kremlin. Since the end of last year, researchers have noticed an increase in social media posts accusing Ukraine of plotting genocide against ethnic Russians – this, by the way, is Putin’s main narrative to justify his military action in the neighboring country.
In the same vein, the Russian government on Saturday (the same day the article was published) banned local media from addressing the war by its name. The newly approved term is “special military operation in Donbass”. That was the expression used by Putin for the invasion, in a recorded speech that was televised on Thursday.
There is also a possible technical explanation for what happened with the Russian news agency. It is a recurrent practice in journalism to prepare texts for publication as soon as an event with considerable chances of happening takes place. In this case, Russian journalists may have rushed or faced some technical problem.
The latter hypothesis served as justification when, earlier this month, the American Bloomberg News accidentally announced that Russia had invaded Ukraine – as is well known, Russian military action in the neighboring country only started in the early hours of last Thursday. At the time, the vehicle released a note in which it acknowledged the mistake and announced an investigation to understand the cause of the problem.
The error of American journalists was cited, at the time, by the Russian government. At the time, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed the incident as a provocation – “There is no need to exaggerate what happened”, but saw the error as a demonstration of how dangerous the tensions around Ukraine are. something that, according to him, is provoked by the West.
