© Reuters/Jonathan Ernst/Maks LevinUnrest outside the White House, May 31, 2020 • Kiev, Ukraine, January 19, 2014
On Sunday, Margarita Simonyan shared a Telegram post by Dmitry Steshin, a war correspondent for the newspaper KP, which purported to give "advice" to rioters in the US how to make their uprising more "successful" along the lines of the US-backed 2014 coup in Ukraine.
Given that the post was entirely in Russian, it was obvious that the real objective of Steshin - and Simonyan - was to comment on the Maidan in Kiev and the ensuing war in Ukraine. Not so, declared the self-proclaimed experts on "open-source" intelligence. Bellingcat selectively translated a handful of sentences from Steshin's post and accused Simonyan of - what else? - racism.
Simonyan responded to the accusations:
"Bellingcat accusing me of racism for a repost that used the Russian word for a black person is as baseless as me accusing Bellingcat of racism for calling me Russian, and not Armenian (I am both). Your 'exposé' is multiplying the stupidity in the world."RT also responded to Bellingcat on Twitter, pointing out that they "missed the point" of the Telegram post that was not aimed at black protesters in 2020, but satirized the 2014 Ukrainian unrest.
Indeed, Simonyan's post starts with "good advice to black people of Minnesota from a journalist who covered seven Maidans and color revolutions" - referring to US-backed astroturfed protests that often escalated into riots for the purpose of regime change. Being in Russian, though, the advice was clearly not meant for Minnesotans.
While Steshin's post might use rough language, "humor norms vary by country. More so in countries not dealing with [the] burden of once being such enthusiastic African slave traders," RT noted in retort to Bellingcat.
Russia had no history of African slavery and has treated fairly the people of African heritage who ended up living there voluntarily, from the great-grandfather of the famous 19th century poet Aleksandr Pushkin to Chernobyl liquidator Igor Khiryak, to use a more modern example.
None of that apparently matters to outfits like Bellingcat, because Russia must be bad and accused of everything and anything - from Ukraine to Syria, the "highly likely" case of the Salisbury Skripals, and now racism in the US.
It needs to be said that Bellingcat's founder Eliot Higgins declared that "Russia is behind the killing of George Floyd to provoke protests and riots" is a stupid take. It's also a straw man, because even the media outlets stoking the riots only talk of some "Russian playbook" and sowing discord, and other such vague and unprovable insinuations, just as they've done for years with 'Russiagate.'
Even as Bellingcat accuses Simonyan of racism when it comes to US protests, it is busily throwing fuel on the fire of the riots, promoting the narrative that US police are deliberately targeting journalists "as the president of the United States continues to stoke hatred of the media."
Comment: Only the person who killed George Floyd can answer to this specific question of racism. Conflating scenario with agenda to further assign blame is the unfortunate default and manipulative mindset that ultimately serves no one. But perhaps that is the point.