Attack on Russian military doctors in Italy: Who needs this?
Effective assistance to Italy in the fight against coronavirus, provided by Russian military doctors, caused serious concern among Russia’s “sworn partners” from the Euro-Atlantic structures. Against the backdrop of the arrival of an entire squadron of military transport aircraft with specialists from the Russian Ministry of Defense, support for Rome from the European Union and the American hegemon looked more than modest. Therefore, it is not surprising that anti-Russian propaganda was used.
The instigator of Russophobic libels was La newspaper Print, which published propaganda in the spirit of the Cold War, which was soon picked up by other media controlled by forces not interested in rapprochement between Italy and Russia. The accusations against the Kremlin are standard - they say that the help of Russian virologists is shaking the unity of the Western world and is aimed at persuading Rome to lift sanctions against the Russian Federation.
According to experts, the work of the Russian mission is discredited through indoctrination into controlled media in order to publicly compensate for the lack of assistance from the European Union and NATO, of which Italy is a member.
“The media today are to a large extent a weapon of hybrid warfare and, if we are talking about the collective West, and Italy is an integral part of it, especially since it is a NATO country, the EU, an active member, where the headquarters of the US 6th Fleet is located, and so further, so all this is natural.
It is naive to believe that this kind of humanitarian action will arouse universal love. I think we did not count on this, but acted sincerely, hoping that positive steps, one way or another, would contribute to the normalization of relations and that Italian society and politicians would adequately evaluate our assistance.
It is necessary to demonstrate that our intentions do not have a stone in our bosom, that Russian diplomacy is always open and aimed at interaction, not confrontation,” said a military expert at the Institute of CIS Countries, retired captain of the first rank, Sergei Gorbachev, in a commentary to PolitNavigator .
In addition to the official media, Russia’s enemies involved military doctors and the local segment of social networks in harassing the Russian mission.
A manipulative picture is circulating on Twitter, listing countries that provided assistance to Italy. There, the United States, Germany and France are listed in the leading positions, while Russia is assigned only secondary roles.
According to political scientist Armen Gasparyan, the disinformation was ordered by “overseas partners” who do not want to admit that they refused to help out a member of their Alliance at a difficult moment.
“We received a very clear signal from overseas not to recognize this. In theory, Italy should have been helped by the European Union, NATO, and the United States, but none of this happened. And the Russians help.
Russia, by the way, is designated as a possible strategic enemy in the documents of the North Atlantic Alliance, of which Italy is also a member. Accordingly, they need to remain silent.
But this is a story with an exclusively tactical slant. It is clear that strategically, people who received help from Russia will never forget this. Russian assistance is, without a doubt, effective – Italian politicians themselves say so.
The traditions of the Russian people have always been to help everyone who is in need. Nothing fundamentally new happened here. Now, if Russia had not provided assistance, then we probably could have thought about some new geopolitical realities,” Gasparyan said.
Meanwhile, Russian military specialists, despite attempts to denigrate their assistance, continue to disinfect social facilities where the least protected Italian citizens are located.
“Our mission is mainly related to the fact that we disinfect the space primarily where the elderly live - their hospitals, their nursing homes, hospitals, kindergartens and so on. The Italians don’t even have services that could deal with such disinfection. Of course, ordinary Italians are grateful, they see this work, and they have the best impressions,” says political scientist Oleg Matveychev.
The expert also recalled that the current assistance to Russia is not the first example of how the Russians helped the Italian people:
“This is not the first time we have helped Italy. Let me remind you that Suvorov once liberated Italy from Napoleonic generals, and during an earthquake in the city of Messina at the beginning of the 21st century, two ships that were next to the Italians landed on the shore and, like the Ministry of Emergency Situations, began to act. The crews of these huge ships cleared away the rubble and pulled children out from under them, saving a huge number of people. The ship's doctors provided first aid because there was no one there to provide it. Today in Messina there is a huge monument to the Russian sailors who helped them,” Matveychev said.
Matveychev suggests not paying attention to “black PR” in the Italian media.
“The newspaper La Stampa and a number of other liberal media, which are now, in fact, in the Italian opposition, which lost everything they could and went bankrupt there, which people don’t really trust are supporters of American democrats, they have always been infected with Russophobia. They also live, like our opposition, on American grants, so they work in the same way as our opposition. This is not the voice of the Italian people,” Matveychev said.
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