The Russian intelligence services are renowned for their imaginative creation of fake news.
Evincing as much, the head of Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service on Tuesday suggested that the CIA is attempting to create a new provocation related to Belarus. The CIA’s intent, he said, is to see fellow Catholics inflamed to take to the streets in opposition to Alexander Lukashenko’s despotic rule.
According to Interfax, Sergey Naryshkin described how “the United States is also unceremoniously interfering in the religious situation in Belarus, seeking to confront the representatives of the Orthodox and Catholic branches of Christianity.” Naryshkin observed that “a plan of high-profile provocation is being hatched, during which [a senior religious figure] would be arrested or even one of the authoritative clerics of the [Roman Catholic Church] would be wounded or killed. The [U.S.] calculation is that this will significantly increase anti-government sentiment among Catholics and spur them on to more active participation in street protests.”
It’s fake news at Novichok concentration: potent in its ramifications, intensely anti-American, and utterly without factual foundation.
While it’s possible that the U.S. government might be trying to persuade Catholic officials to speak up more loudly in support of the Belarusian people, there is no evidence of any provocation operation. Such an operation would never be authorized or carried out. Still, the motive for the SVR’s creative deduction is quite simple. Russia wants the U.S. and European Union to suspend their support for the protesters now calling on Lukashenko to step down.
With Kim Jong Un-style statistical aplomb, Lukashenko stole the election on Aug. 9. Since then, Belarusians have been peacefully taking to the streets to demand his resignation. Russia faces a growing challenge in this very obviously popular uprising. The Kremlin has deployed intelligence and military personnel to Minsk, but it is reluctant to use them to crush the protesters, as that would risk inviting Western sanctions, where sanctions are already being threatened over the recent assassination attempt against Alexei Navalny.
Naryshkin’s provocation deception thus aims to undermine Western support efforts and consolidate Lukashenko as the irreplaceable guardian of order and stability against a secret cabal. A hard-liner very close to Vladimir Putin, Naryshkin despises the U.S. and the liberal international order it leads. Where its military intelligence competitor, the GRU, prefers to kill people, the SVR advances Putin’s interests by operating deep cover “illegal” intelligence officers in the West. It also focuses on blackmailing and recruiting foreign officials as spies and spreading disinformation. Naryshkin played a key role in Moscow’s 2016 election interference campaign and has supervised very significant and highly successful efforts to influence British politics.
The Russian intelligence service tradition of fake news was not born in 2016. Rather, it originated with the tsar’s late 19th-century imperial Okhrana service. Put simply, fake news is in the blood of the Russian intelligence services. In this case, however, the allegations are so absurd that they deserve no recognition whatsoever. The U.S. should instead remain focused on the human rights and security implications of Lukashenko’s continued rule. As a first step, Washington should follow Britain and Canada’s lead and introduce sanctions against Lukashenko.
