Russophobia is not a phenomenon confined strictly to the United States and Great Britain. According to a report from TASS, the practice of rhetorical attacks and slander against the Russian Federation is common across several Western European nations as well:
Several countries are currently using Russophobia as a tool against Russia’s independent foreign policy, Russian Federation Council (upper house) Speaker Valentina Matviyenko said during the second Moscow International Conference on combating anti-Semitism, racism and xenophobia, called “Protecting [the] Future.”
“Today, we are facing increasing Russophobia, which is used by certain forces in the West and some other countries as a tool to stifle Russia’s development and to counter independent foreign policy – the policy aimed at forming a multipolar world,” she said, expanding on the topic of an alleged Russian threat.
In her speech, the speaker noted that “currently, many countries carry out an open policy of hostility, even hatred for representatives of other nations. Nazi criminals and their accomplices are seen as heroes… The current Ukrainian officials are the ones who have been most successful in this regard, who basically presented this ideology as an official policy,” Matviyenko stated.
The speaker added that Ukraine is not the only country where this takes place. “Zones of ethnic segregation and apartheid have virtually been established in the center of Europe. I am talking about granting about 300 thousand Russian-speaking residents of Latvia and Estonia the status of “non-citizens”. Not only these people cannot participate in politics, they even have several limited rights,” she concluded.
Russophobia has long been used as a tool from the Cold War days, but it gained new life after 2013’s Valdai conference and 2014’s Olympic Games, when President Putin took a stand for traditional values for faith and family, which were very much in opposition to “progressive” American and European values.
The present report from TASS follows up on a September 21st – dated piece that noted that Russophobia effectively blocked any positive developments in US-Russia ties following the July 16th summit of Presidents Putin and Donald Trump in Helsinki, Finland. That summit was praised by both men, but President Trump was absolutely castigated in the American press as well as by his own party’s political establishment in Washington, DC.
Russophobia in the United States stands as a standard part of American foreign policy, and with only President Trump and Senator Rand Paul expressing any ideas out of the political mainstream, it has been very difficult for the efforts of the American president to improve his country’s relationship with Russia to succeed.
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