Overall cyber-works, cross-country coverage and the targeted disruption of internet services – for one of the Kremlin’s biggest propagandists, all of these tactics are an honest game in what she describes as a fatal US war
‘War [with the U.S.] is inevitable, ”said Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of state-funded Russian media RT and Sputnik, who believes the conflict will break out when Vladimir Putin no longer wants to occupy Ukrainian territory.
While Russia’s military build-up on Ukraine’s threshold is underway, Kremlin’s loyalists have demanded even more overt aggression and bloodshed in the campaign to annex Ukraine’s Donbas region. The only thing that stands in the way, they say, is US support for their beleagured neighbor.
The club of G-7 countries, which includes the US, on Monday issued a joint statement demanding that Russia stop building troops on the border with the disputed Donbas area in eastern Ukraine, recalling the build-up to the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014. The US underlined these words by deploying two warships to the Black Sea.
On Tuesday, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov threatened retaliation. “We warn the United States that it would be better for them to stay away from Crimea and our Black Coast. It will be for their own good, ”he said.
The escalation was predicted by state television Sunday Night With Vladimir Soloviev over the weekend. Simonyan explained that it was time for Russia to act for a showdown with the US, and prophesied that a kind of war would be driven by burglary, the forced disruption of internet access, the shutdown of power supplies and an overall offensive on the US infrastructure.
‘I do not believe that it will be a large-scale hot war like the Second World War, and I do not believe that there will be a long Cold War. It will be a war of the third type: the cyber war, ‘Simonyan said.
She warned that the US – in this theoretical battle – would plan to cut off electricity from entire Russian cities. In turn, she speculated, Moscow could force a blackout in Florida or Harlem in New York.
“In a conventional war, we can defeat Ukraine in two days,” Simonyan said, “but it will be a different kind of war. We’ll do it, and then [the U.S.] will respond by the force to [the Russian city] Voronezh, ”she said.
The top RT editor claims that ‘[Russia] must be ready for this war, which is inevitable, and of course it will start in Ukraine, ‘arguing that the Kremlin’ is invincible in terms of conventional war, but forget about the conventional war … it will be a war of infrastructure, and here we have many vulnerabilities. ”
Her solution consists of Stalin’s measures to eliminate “vulnerabilities” in the run-up to another escalation, stressing the need for a hack-resistant, government-controlled Internet. “We still do not have a sovereign internet, but if we want to, we will,” she said.
She wholeheartedly endorsed the proposal of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the ultranationalist leader of the Russian Liberal Democratic Party, who argued that the entire Russian opposition should be eliminated by May 1, 2021. With the imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny on a hunger strike – and suffering from serious health ailments after being denied appropriate medical treatment – the Kremlin seems to have definitely been instituted.
Simonyan argued that once Russia minimizes its vulnerabilities and renders Putin’s opposition powerless – which she says could happen in a matter of months – the Kremlin will finally be ready to annex the eastern region of Ukraine.
‘I stirred and even demanded that we take Donbas. We need to fix our vulnerability as soon as possible, and then we can do what we want, ‘she said courageously. The host, Vladimir Soloviev, wholeheartedly agrees: “We only lose if we do nothing.” He argued that Russia would absorb parts of Ukraine – or the entire country – could remove the area of American influence further from its borders.
As one of the Kremlin’s esteemed propagandists, Margarita Simonyan is notoriously close to the Russian president and has received several awards directly from Putin. After accepting such an award in 2019, Simonyan Putin ‘thanks for the most important reward in life … this honor of serving your homeland.’
Her ‘service’ has relatively driven information operations run by RT and Sputnik, aimed at influencing the 2016 US presidential election, which she regularly boasts of pointing to the inclusion of her name in various US intelligence reports.
Russia’s recent cyberspace activity seems to be a good practice for the ‘inevitable war’ that Simonyan is predicting.
Last year, six Russian intelligence officials were criminally charged by the United States for using the world’s most destructive mischief to enforce power outages in Ukraine and damage the critical infrastructure of several countries, causing nearly $ 1 billion in losses. On Monday, hackers operating from Russia targeted France’s homeschooling platform.
The Kremlin is prepared to intensify its offensive against the West, but fears retaliation. The idea of a bulletproof ‘sovereign internet’ – completely under government control within Russia’s borders – is already in the books, with Moscow introducing the idea as a precautionary measure against retaliatory attempts by other nations to invade.
Simonyan argued that Russia would certainly be able to take advantage of the US ‘catastrophic’ education standards, calling US military analysts and specialists incompetent and stupid. She laughs heartily at the news that more than 200,000 American service members are experiencing hearing loss due to defective earplugs.
‘We can never come to any agreement [Americans]”Simonyan said, arguing that instead Russia could just as easily defeat the United States in a cyber war.
She mockingly added, “We don’t even need the nukes.”