The Beating Of A Liberal Journalist & Her Lawyer In Chechnya Was Likely A Western Provocation
Unlike the West and its Ukrainian proxies, the Russian leadership and its special services have much more integrity than to carry out false flag provocations, though this perception has been shattered among some in the Alt-Media Community by the reckless peddling of conspiracy theories about Prigozhin’s failed coup attempt.
Liberal journalist Elena Milashina and her lawyer Aleksandr Nemov were brutally beaten in Chechnya on Tuesday on their way from the airport to attend a high-profile trial. Chechen head Ramzan Kadyrov condemned the attack and ordered that the perpetrators be found. The federal Investigative Committee and presidential human rights ombudsman are also involved. The seriousness with which the regional and federal authorities are taking this incident suggest that neither had anything to do with it.
Chechen Minister for National Policy, Foreign Relations, Press, and Information of the Republic Akhmed Dudayev speculated that “in view of the global processes that are taking place in the context of the special military operation, it cannot be ruled out that the authors of the attack scenario pursued the goal of discrediting our country once again before the upcoming NATO summit in Vilnius. The distinctive modus operandi of Western special services is clearly traceable here.”
This hypothesis makes a lot of sense since it serves Western interests to discredit and destabilize Chechnya, especially as punishment for its head’s loyalty to President Putin throughout the course of the special operation and most recently during Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed coup attempt. By contrast, there isn’t any cogent explanation for how his region’s interests the federal government’s are advanced by this act of violence that’s already being widely discussed by Western outlets like CNN.
In the soft power sense, this incident is a “trigger event” for reviving the West’s two-decade-long information warfare campaign against Chechnya, which is suspiciously occurring right after their “useful idiot” failed to “Balkanize” Russia during his brief armed rebellion less than two weeks ago. It’s unrealistic to imagine that regional and/or federal officials would give their existential enemies the pretext to do this by organizing Tuesday’s beating, which is a logical argument against blaming them.
Neither has any reason to draw more attention to the high-profile trial that this liberal journalist and her lawyer were planning to attend, which involves clan intrigue and human rights, thus already making it very sensational from the West’s perspective. Those who attacked these two wanted the international audience to think that officials, whether regional and/or federal, were desperate to suppress reporting about this case. These optics were entirely predictable, which is why neither was likely responsible.
No sincere supporter of Russia in the Alt-Media Community (AMC) would lend credence to the innuendo from their camp’s Mainstream Media (MSM) rivals suggesting that officials from that country were behind this brutal beating, yet a sizeable number of folks might be receptive to that conspiracy theory. That’s because top AMC influencers have convinced them that President Putin carried out a “false flag coup” last month, which implies that he ordered the killing of those pilots who he later commemorated.
By maliciously impugning the integrity of the Russian leader, his security services, other officials, and their media while deviously spinning their alleged complicity in that deadly plot as some sort of “5D chess master plan”, they made Russia’s supporters more likely to distrust anything that it says. Accordingly, once they think that President Putin had a hand in the deaths of his own military’s pilots, they’re susceptible to falling for MSM innuendo hinting that his government ordered other attacks too.
Regarding this latest incident, there are no credible reasons to believe that it played any role in this beating, nor in earlier attacks against other liberals either. Nevertheless, the MSM wants their targeted audience to think that it did, which includes those among the AMC who recently fell for the “sixth columnist” conspiracy theory described above. The only way for Russia to protect itself from the West’s information warfare onslaught is for this country’s supporters to sincerely believe in its integrity.
If someone thinks that its leader ordered a mercenary chief to shoot down several pilots in order to make the latter’s supposedly staged mutiny more convincing, then there’s a much greater chance that they’ll think that he ordered the beating of that liberal journalist and her lawyer. Similarly, such people are also inclined to think that Russia might have blown up its own Kakhovka Dam last month, not to mention possibly plotting to do the same to the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant too like Kiev claims.
To be clear, some false flags have been indisputably proven while there’s compelling evidence for believing others, but there’s no credible basis to suspect that Russia carried out a spree of these operations against itself over the past month. Unlike the West and its Ukrainian proxies, the Russian leadership and its special services have much more integrity than to do so, though this perception has been shattered among some in the AMC by the reckless peddling of conspiracy theories about Prigozhin.
Those previously trusted top influencers who did this in order to generate clout, advance their ideology, and/or solicit donations, while at worst deliberately intending to undermine their audience’s trust in Russia, caused a crisis of confidence in the AMC. Instead of being seen by its supporters as the victim of false flag plots, Russia is now suspected of masterminding them. Unless this false perception is corrected, Russia’s supporters will continue being manipulated by the MSM into distrusting it.