Many in the Alt-Media Community (AMC) take their cues from trusted figures who have a tendency to oversimplify developments in black-and-white terms. The Western-centric Ukrainian peace talks in Jeddah were a case in point where top influencers such as this one here jumped the gun by condemning Brazil and India as “Trojan Horses” for participating in them before they began. After China joined, these same AMC figures were suspiciously silent, but the Mainstream Media (MSM) picked up the baton.
They tried making the Jeddah talks a wedge issue in Russian-Chinese ties, just like their putative rivals in the AMC attempted to do mostly with respect to Russian-Indian ones. The combined effect of these coincidentally timed efforts was that folks were left with the impression that Russia is mad at those two for attending these talks. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was seemingly aware that a lot of people were misled by these complementary campaigns, which is why he just set the record straight.
Speaking at the 11th Moscow Conference on International Security on Tuesday, he said that “We appreciate China, Brazil, South Africa, Egypt, India and other Global South countries’ sincere interest in promoting the quest for fair and realistic settlement avenues. President Putin and our country’s leadership have repeatedly spoken about this.” Far from being mad at China and India, Russia is glad that they shared their pragmatic views for resolving the NATO-Russian proxy war with several dozen states.
Lavrov wasn’t turning lemons into lemonade by putting a positive spin on its top two partners anywhere in the world doing something that Russia supposedly opposed in secret, but was accurately reflecting the Kremlin’s position towards those two’s participation in the Jeddah talks. Russia opposed Ukraine and its Western patrons’ intentions in wanting to rally the world against it, but truly appreciated that China, India, and others weren’t swayed into arming Kiev or sanctioning their country.
Had those two in particular not attended that event, then it would likely have descended into Russia-bashing, especially considering that Brazil and Egypt repeatedly voted against Russia at the UNGA despite not arming Kiev or sanctioning Moscow. By participating in it, however, the world’s most populous countries were able to explain to the largest number of international policymakers thus far why they’ve abstained from such votes and share their pragmatic views for resolving this proxy war.
China and India therefore flipped the diplomatic tables on Ukraine and its Western patrons, which imbued other attendees like Brazil and Egypt with additional confidence, thus ensuring that they didn’t let themselves be swayed into arming Kiev, sanctioning Russia, and/or supporting Zelensky’s faux “peace formula”. It’s for the preceding reason why Lavrov explicitly said that Russia appreciates those countries and others’ “sincere interest in promoting the quest for fair and realistic settlement avenues.”
This debunked the speculation pushed by some leading AMC influencers who implied that Russia wasn’t happy that India and other close partners participated in the Jeddah talks. There’s no shame in getting something wrong, but what one does afterwards proves whether they’re an analyst or a propagandist: the first will account for why they were mistaken on major issues in order to improve their craft and correct their audience’s perceptions, while the second will ignore their mistake or double down on it.
