“Russia continues to do its utmost to build a world on the basis of law, truth and justice," he pledged, and cited US President Harry Truman, a prime foe of the Soviet Union that preceded the current Russian Federation: ‘Great nations lead by the force of example rather than domination.’ "I hope that the culture of mutually respectful dialogue will finally prevail. Russia will do its utmost to promote this goal,”
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3-13-2015 In January 2015 negative perceptions of the West in Russia rose to the highest level ever recorded in the history of Russian public opinion polling. Eighty-one percent of people surveyed had a negative perception of the United States, while a mere 13% had a positive view. 71% viewed the European Union negatively, with 20% having a positive perception. One year earlier, the results were 44 to 43% for the US, and 34 to 51% for Europe. 42% described Russia’s relations with the US as “hostile”, up from 4% just one year ago. One out of four Russians thought relations with the EU were hostile – whereas two years ago, in January 2013, only one person out of a hundred saw Russia-EU relations in this light.
The current antagonism is nurtured by the aggressive anti-Western propaganda that has accompanied the crisis in Ukraine since its onset in late 2013....The mass protests that erupted in late 2011 openly challenged his legitimacy and called for “Russia without Putin”. The Kremlin could no longer afford to be permissive towards critically-minded liberals and Westernisers.
Putin’s first public reaction to the protests was to blame the US. “Certain figures in Russia,” he said, “heard the signal and, with the support of the US Department of State, began active work.” In the following months, the term “GosDep” (the Russian acronym for the US State Department) became a political slur that stood for the “evil America” that was plotting against Russia. The pro-Kremlin propagandists launched a smear campaign aimed at discrediting the protesters by portraying them as serving the anti-Russian interests of the West. These accusations were soon extended to liberal journalists as well as civic and political activists, who were commonly condemned as the “fifth column” and “national traitors”.
In 2012 USAID was kicked out of Russia. The new US ambassador, Michael McFaul, was attacked by the Russian media and became the target of personal insults, intimidation, and harassment.
In spring 2013 a nationwide government campaign against foreign-funded nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) affected hundreds of NGOs across Russia. The campaign was based on a new legal requirement that NGOs receiving foreign grants and engaged in (very loosely defined) political activity brand themselves as “foreign agents”, a term associated with espionage....
In the past Putin would occasionally speak of the West as an unfriendly competitor or a force that seeks to do Russia harm. But in his third term he also assumed a posture of moral condemnation. In his public speeches in late 2013 Putin sounded like a preacher: he harshly criticised the “Euroatlantic” countries for their decadence and immorality. He said they had abandoned their roots and their Christian values and equated “belief in God with belief in Satan”. He condemned European multiculturalism and dismissed the policy of tolerance as “neutered and barren”. And a wide range of officials and loyalists eagerly took up Putin’s words.
One clever propaganda trick was to enhance the image of the evil West by merging together the social conservative and the anti-Western posture. In this way the West and Westernisers, gay people, liberals, contemporary artists and their fans, those who did not treat the Russian Orthodox Church with due respect, and those who dared to doubt Russia’s unblemished historical record were all presented as one “indivisible evil”,” a threat to Russia, its culture, its values and its very national identity....
The annexation of Crimea can be seen as the crucial point (of no return?) of a definitive rupture with the West. Lev Gudkov, the director of Levada Center, Russia’s main independent polling agency, points out that the annexation also seemed to act as a kind of moral deliverance: Putin demonstrated on the world stage that he would not be bound by international rules and norms, and at home, Gudkov told me, he “allow[ed] the masses to feel enormous relief upon discarding the burdensome normative obligations associated with the West”.
Western sanctions originally imposed in response to the annexation of Crimea seemed to confirm the narrative that Putin put forward: now (and especially with the new rounds of sanctions later in the year) the West was really seeking to do harm to Russia, to punish it so that it would suffer more. What seemed especially outrageous to the Russian people was that the sanctions were imposed as a penalty for what they saw as Russia’s/Putin’s most glorious achievement. The common propaganda line – that the West is determined to prevent Russia from standing strong and proud – was thereby fully and graphically substantiated....Putin has even emphasized that the sanctions “are not related to [Crimea]”, but are part of a perennial policy of containment that was not invented yesterday, but has been pursued against Russia “for many years, decades if not centuries.”...
The West is continually cited as the force behind the coup in Ukraine. "The Ukrainian crisis,”Putin told the Egyptian daily Al Ahram, “[…] emerged in response to the attempts of the USA and its Western allies who considered themselves ‘winners’of the cold war to impose their will everywhere.” He went on to accuse the EU ‘s “Eastern Partnership” of attempting to “tear states which had been parts of the former USSR off Russia and to prompt them to make an artificial choice ‘between Russia and Europe’”. The West is also broadly assumed to be backing the Ukrainian armed forces (Putin recently said that those who oppose the insurgents in Donbas are in fact a “NATO foreign legion”).
Moreover the West is seen as being behind all the “colour revolutions” from Georgia to Egypt; its goal today is considered to be “regime change” in Russia....A quarter-century after the end of the Cold War, Russia regards itself as a “fortress under siege”: its hatred of the West is broad, genuine and raw. According to Lev Gudkov’s colleagues at Levada Center, who have recently conducted focus groups, those who do not accept the official line are resented by their compatriots. “Even more than the West,” point out Aleksey Levinson and Lyubov Borusyak, “the participants hate the ‘fifth column’, those who ‘undermine the country from within’; you constantly hear them say that such people should ‘get out of Russia’.” https://www.ecfr.eu/article/commentary_how_russia_has_come_to_loathe_the_west311346
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