- Kremlin hawk talks of need for harsh campaign against West - Ex-president Medvedev: Response needed against sanctions - Calls for Western society, infrastructure to be targeted - Western officials have accused Russia of sabotage - Moscow has publicly rejected those allegations
One of Russia’s top security officials called on Thursday for Russians to mobilise to inflict “maximum harm” on Western societies and infrastructure as payback for increasingly tough sanctions being imposed on Moscow by the U.S. and its allies.
The statement by Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council and Vladimir Putin’s predecessor as president, came as the West sharply escalated sanctions on Moscow in efforts to degrade its ability to wage war in Ukraine.
“We need to (respond). Not only the authorities, the state, but all our people in general. After all, they - the U.S. and its crappy allies - have declared a war on us without rules!,” Medvedev wrote on his official Telegram channel, which has over 1.3 million followers.
“Every day we should try to do maximum harm to those countries that have imposed these restrictions. Harm their economies, their institutions and their rulers. Harm the well-being of their citizens, their confidence in the future.”
Diplomats say Medvedev gives a flavour of hardline and high level thinking in the Kremlin, though Kyiv and Kremlin critics play down his influence, casting him as a scaremonger whose job is to deter Western action over Ukraine.
In his latest comments he spoke of the need to find critical vulnerabilities in Western economies, to target energy, industry, transport, banking and social services, and to stir up social tensions.
Western officials have already spoken about suspected Russian sabotage activities across the West, including arson, with some calling for Russian diplomats’ movements to be curbed.
The Kremlin, which said on Thursday it was considering retaliatory action against the U.S. that would best suit Moscow’s own interests, and the Russian foreign ministry have rejected the sabotage allegations as false.
‘Fake news’
Medvedev, who styled himself as a Western-friendly liberal during his 2008-12 presidency before reinventing himself as one of the Kremlin’s toughest hawks, spoke of the need to step up an information war against the West.
“Are they screaming about our use of fake news? Let’s turn their lives into a crazy nightmare in which they can’t distinguish wild fiction from the realities of the day, infernal evil from the routine of life,” he wrote.
Medvedev also called for Russia to weaponise space and arm the West’s enemies, as the new U.S. sanctions forced Russia’s leading exchange to halt dollar and euro trading, obscuring access to reliable pricing for the Russian currency.
So Russia is pissed and has no idea how to hurt the West.
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Aww, not the daily nuke threat? He must be going soft.
I hope you guys realise this “maximum harm” involves trolling.
Just ask yourself, what would a Russian troll look like, in real life.
For instance a person going by archcomrade on midwest.social is definitely either an actual troll or a brainwashed tankie, but going by his actions and comments, I think the former.
Posts only about how one shouldn’t vote for Democrats in the US elections, never says anything bad about Putler or Trump, and keeps questioning the situation in the Ukraine, referring to “the West” in general, like a russian would.
And me just noting this led to insane mass reporting of my comments.
Little Putler’s bitches hate losing.
We really need to launch an earnest covert war against the blyats and destroy their criminal state once and for all.
They’ve been doing that with their cybercrime gangs for at least a decade. The gangs have unofficial protection and permission to attack the “amers” and their allies as long as they don’t attack Russian interests (to the point where malware would sometimes erase itself if a machine’s language was set to Russian), in return for serving as a talent pool for the GRU. It’s an arrangement not unlike the letters of marque that elevated pirates to loyal privateers.
