The Putin Channel: Kremlin TV Beats EU to Europe’s Russian Speakers
This article is for subscribers only.
Russian is the European Union’s seventh-most widely spoken language and the lingua franca of former Soviet countries in the EU’s eastern neighborhood. It’s a fact Europeans chose to ignore until last year, when Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Crimea and helped ignite the conflict in eastern Ukraine, saying he was defending the rights of local Russian speakers.
When Crimeans applauded the annexation, it became clear that for years since the collapse of the Communist bloc, the EU has done next to nothing to win the hearts and minds of these Europeans. That has left them available for the increasingly barbed and sophisticated TV propaganda of the Kremlin.