Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service claims that the US is preparing a major propaganda campaign aimed at sparking fear among the population of Sweden and Finland about Moscow’s alleged “territorial appetites.”
In a press release on Thursday, the service claimed that the US State Department, “gripped with anti-Russian hysteria,” has transformed into an “unprincipled propaganda mouthpiece” that is now striving to turn the entire international community against Russia.
The first targets of this propaganda machine, according to Moscow, are the residents of Sweden and Finland, which recently joined NATO.
The Foreign Intelligence Service has claimed that, under the patronage of the US State Department, a series of short videos will soon flood social media networks and instant messengers to demonstrate “the ‘seriousness of the Russian threat’ and drum up ‘universal fear’ of Moscow’s ‘territorial appetites’” among the Scandinavian population.
The campaign, according to the service, will be presented as a “spiritual impulse” of a team of independent experts and journalists, and will aim to spread panic among the residents of Sweden and Finland, akin to the times of McCarthyism in the US. After that, Washington supposedly expects top officials in the two countries to “start throwing themselves out of the windows, shouting ‘the Russians are coming, the Russians are coming! They are everywhere.’”
At the same time, high-ranking Swedish and Finnish officials are being trained, “like diligent students,” to repeat the “Russophobic mantras of their American patrons without hesitation,” the service wrote.
Specifically, it mentioned the commander-in-chief of the Swedish Armed Forces, Micael Byden, who recently claimed that Russia is planning to invade the island of Gotland to establish control in the Baltic Sea; and Finnish President Alexander Stubb, who has claimed that Russia poses an “existential threat” and has insisted that the only way to achieve peace is “through the battlefield.”
Moscow has repeatedly stated that it has no plans to attack any NATO nations or revise its existing borders with the West. Russian President Vladimir Putin has dismissed such talk as “nonsense,” and an attempt to scare local citizens “to extract additional expenses from people.”