Suspicious: See What The Russians Are Reporting About The US


As we all spend countless hours trying to parse the relationship between the administration and the Russian government, the tweets come rolling out fast and furious.

But do you ever wonder what the Russians have to say about what’s going on?

I do.

So I checked on Twitter, reading some of the Russian journalists and Russian officials that I follow. I wondered if they’d be talking about AG Sessions, the hearings. I wondered if they might have anything at all to say about the way that their government attacked our election and tried to influence it.

I thought they might have some input to share about the way that the Russian hack into the news media in Qatar, which sparked an international crisis.

Ha. Silly me.

What I found as I read the Twitter feeds from Russia is that they are uniformly fixated on Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. They seem to take the lanky Texan at his word, although whether or not he really said these things is questionable.

One Russian official, Sergey Pushkov, tweeted out a quote that he said came from Tillerson. Pushkov is an author, a journalist and a member of the Defense and Security Committee of the Russian Federation. He tweeted that American allies around the world are demanding that the U.S. work to improve relations with Russia. But, he goes on, the Americans are not responding, and so the relationship is getting worse and worse.

Oh, poor Russia. So sad that the United States isn’t being more friendly.

Then there’s the Twitter feed from Russia Today (RT), the government owned international news agency. This propaganda agency tweeted that Rex Tillerson kept the Russians up to date about the dangers of North Korea.

But they also repeated the claims made by Pushkov, where Tillerson is said to have been urged to fix relations with Russia. The focus is on American allies, who, they say, are unwilling to support the bad relations with Russia.

What’s so interesting is that the Russian version of events says that Tillerson has been urged by American allies in Europe to make things better with Russia.

But the American press says that it was Donald Trump who has pushed Tillerson to patch things up with his Russian buddies.

That’s a pretty significant way to shade the details, don’t you think? Here in the U.S., we’re told that the President is pushing for better relations with Russia. In Russia, they’re reading that its our European allies who want things to be better.

You have to wonder what Vladimir Putin has to gain from making it seem that its the rest of the world who wants strong US-Russia relations. Is he trying to get everyone to look away from the Putin-Trump bromance? Is he trying to create tension between us and our allies?

Who knows?

All I know is that it’s very important for us all to keep our eyes on Russian media.

Featured image by Global Panorama via Flickr. (CC BY SA 2.0)

Karen is a retired elementary school teacher with many years of progressive activism behind her. She is the proud mother of three young adults who were all arrested with Occupy Wall Street. To see what she writes about in her spare time, check out her blog at "Empty Nest, Full Life"