RUSSIAN regime media used to sneer about Scottish independence. The Kremlin, after all, as recently as 2013 introduced a new law banning “separatist propaganda”. Its penalty: prison.
Yet news outlets paid for and controlled by the government of increasingly authoritarian President Vladimir Putin have hatched conspiracies about the 2014 vote and championed fringe Yes voices.
Nato and Western security services see such reporting as part of a concerted effort by Russian to undermine public faith in democratic institutions, including the free press. They stress that such media, particularly TV station RT and news agency and radio outlet Sputnik, will adopt any cause, even those unpalatable to Russia, which they believe will help reach that goal.
Thus Kremlin propaganda channels – and armies of anonymous social media “trolls” – also championed Donald Trump in the United States Marine Le Pen in France and the Leave campaign in the UK.
The Russians, sources say, believe their information war forces are just as important a part of their military strength as their army, navy and air force.
This is the Gerasimov Doctrine, first devised by a senior Russian general of the same name in 2013. Its aim: to clutter the information space with so much nonsense nobody knows how to tell fact from fiction, truth from lie.
Scotland is a tiny but intriguing part of this global picture. Experts – speaking anonymously to a Holyrood group – believe the Kremlin may be about to reverse its support for Scottish independence. Why? Because it is much more invested in the EU-weakening Brexit than in the SNP, which has largely spurned its advances.
Yet there were specific reasons why the Kremlin gave tacit and unsolicited support to Yes, often under the unsophisticated guise of offering a “balanced” alternative to mainstream media.
And those reasons have nothing to do with Scotland and everything to do with Ukraine and its Russian-backed breakaway regions. The first hint that the Scottish independence referendum could be weaponised in Ukraine came long before Sputnik was created or Valery Gerasimov had signed off his doctrine. This was when, way back in January 2013, a pro-Russian former politician from the then Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, Yuri Meshkov, called for a Scottish solution to his region’s future. It was, essentially, a Russian unionist hijacking a vote secured by Scottish Nationalists. Classic whataboutery.
“As God is our witness, we are so far in favour of a peaceful European- style, Scottish-style resolution of our conflict,” Meshkov told a Moscow press conference. A little over a year later and a key Putin ally, the speaker of the upper house of the Russian Parliament was a sudden convert to independence referendums. “In what way are Scots better than Crimeans?” she said. Crimeans got their vote. But they cast their ballots with their peninsula under Russian military occupation. It was not ‘Scottish’ style. Crimea is now Russia. Two other regions in eastern Ukraine are in constitutional limbo. Russia supports several other otherwise unrecognised states. It invited the SNP to parlay with the leaders of these statelets at Moscow anti-globalisation events. Nationalists declined. As memories of the Crimean plebiscite fades, it may be that Scotland and its independence movement have served their purpose for the Kremlin.
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