A senior Russian diplomat mocked “American exceptionalism in practice” while rebuffing U.S. assessments that Moscow is capitalizing on the riots that broke out following the death of George Floyd.
“Are you trying to play the Russia card again?” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote Monday. “You have been playing too long; please, come back to reality. Go out and face your people, look them in the eye and try telling them that they are being controlled by the Russians through YouTube and Facebook. And I will sit back and watch ‘American exceptionalism’ in action.”
That derisive statement was directed at former national security adviser Susan Rice. Zakharova’s jabs at the former Obama administration adviser were carried on state-run media alongside news stories highlighting that “civil unrest continues” and columns criticizing U.S. responses to the controversy.
“This is the classic Russian playbook,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Zack Cooper said Monday. “This is really what the Russians traditionally have done, is try to tear down any strong foreign governments to create confusion and discord within those societies. So they often look to just sort of weaken and confuse the situation. They’re not seeking as much to build a forceful narrative of their own.”
Rice made a similar argument Sunday. “We’ve seen it for years, including on social media where they take any divisive, painful issue … and they play on both sides,” she said during a televised interview. “I would not be surprised to learn that they have fomented some of these extremists on both sides on social media … [or] that they’re funding it in some way, shape, or form.”
Zakharova likened that statement to the U.S. assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 president elections, a finding that Obama’s administration first released but that Trump advisers and most Republican leaders have echoed, despite President Trump’s discomfort with the conclusion.
“Hillary Clinton and the Obama team convinced themselves and tried to convince the world that the domestic problems in the United States were created and encouraged by an external force: Russia,” she said in the open letter to Rice. “You are repeating this mistake today together with a CNN reporter, using dirty methods of information manipulation, such as fake news and absolutely no facts to prove your allegation.”
Trump’s national security adviser agreed with his Obama-era predecessor. “Our foreign adversaries are going to take advantage of this crisis to sew discord and to try and damage our democracy,” White House adviser Robert O’Brien said on a Sunday morning talk show. “But, listen, to our adversaries, the American people, we may have our political differences, and we’ve gone through these crises before, but we’ll overcome it.”
Cooper said that the footage of Floyd’s death, which took place after a police officer in Minneapolis kneeled on him for several minutes despite the dying man’s protests that he couldn’t breathe, have given Russia an easy opportunity to capitalize on American disunity.
“That’s not disinformation, that’s just talking about a fissure in U.S. society,” the AEI scholar said. “They’re also talking about violence that has been going on the last few days, and both of those are ripe targets for Moscow, but as I said, I don’t think they’re driving this debate within the United States. That debate is happening, and they’ll just try to put a little bit of fuel on the fire and make those divisions harder to heal.”
