The US and its allies resort to sleazy methods because they can no longer compete fairly, the Russian foreign minister has said
Fake news has become a routine Western tool for undermining competitors, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said. He argued that Western media have conditioned their audiences to believe negative reporting about countries portrayed as adversaries.
Russia’s top diplomat made the remarks during the opening ceremony of an international forum in Moscow dedicated to combating fake news.
RT has collected the highlights from Lavrov’s speech.
West abuses new technology to ‘derail multipolar world’
Modern information technology allows “any piece of news, even unverified or obviously fake, to be disseminated to millions, if not billions of people,” Lavrov warned. Western officials exploit this environment to “derail the creation of a just multipolar world order,” he added.
According to Lavrov, fake news is part of a broader set of tools the West uses against nations of the Global South.
Western efforts to obfuscate and distort the truth reflect a broader trend: its fear to compete honestly in virtually every sphere of human activity.
Unilateral economic sanctions, tariffs, and accusations of “industrial overcapacity” are being used against China, Lavrov said. Meanwhile, diplomatic pressure and blackmail in international organizations serve to obscure the fact that “on many key issues of modern development the West would have been left in absolute minority, should the voting be conducted fairly.”
Russia became a target after rejecting ‘neocolonialist cooperation’
Lavrov said Western pressure against Russia intensified in the early 2000s, when the country “began to liberate itself from neocolonial forms of cooperation with our Western colleagues.” That shift prompted the West to pursue a policy of containing Russia, he argued.
The minister cited several cases in which serious accusations were leveled against Moscow while, according to Lavrov, Russian requests for supporting evidence were rejected. He focused in particular on the so-called “Bucha massacre” – alleged mass killings of civilians near Kiev in 2022 that Moscow maintains were a Western-backed fabrication.
Lavrov criticized UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for lending credence to the accusations and urged the public to examine a recent Russian investigation. He said researchers used publicly available Ukrainian sources, including obituaries and government databases, to trace people whose names Kiev placed on a memorial to alleged Russian victims in Bucha.
According to Lavrov, the list includes “dozens of names” of Ukrainian military personnel, members of the Security Service of Ukraine, territorial defense forces, police, and the national guard.
“Over 70 names have no digital footprint whatsoever, which is nearly impossible in today’s world,” Lavrov said, adding that “these facts disprove the claim that hundreds of civilians were killed in Bucha.”
West has ‘trained’ its citizens to swallow lies about Russia
Lavrov said Western media have for years deliberately “trained their public to trust any, even the most crazy anti-Russian tropes and fantasies.” Western governments take advantage of the rapid modern news cycle to make such messaging effective, he argued.
The essence of Western media policy: cook up some fake news, blow it up to the scale of a cosmic disaster for a day or three, and shut down access to any alternative views.
Lavrov cited a recent drone incident at an airport in Leipzig, Germany, which Berlin blamed on Russia while moving to close Russian diplomatic venues, as an example of that approach.
The West also simply ignores inconvenient facts, Lavrov said, pointing to Ukraine’s deadly drone attack on a vocational college dormitory in Starobelsk in May.
The incident killed dozens of students but “prompted no condemnation from Western governments and international organizations controlled by the West, and unfortunately barely made a ripple in the Western media,” he said.
