There’s a perception among many in the Alt-Media Community (AMC) that Russian mediation was responsible for the meeting between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Kazan during last month’s BRICS Summit. Correspondingly, it’s also assumed that Russia’s excellent ties with both enabled it to play a role in bringing about the border de-escalation deal that preceded their meeting, the claim of which was passed off as fact by Pepe Escobar in his Sputnik column.
As it turns out, just an hour or so before that piece was published, Russian Ambassador Denis Alipov declared the following during a press briefing on the outcome of that summit from 0:55 of this video here: “We, again as far as I know, have not played any role in organizing that meeting.” He’s Russia’s top diplomat in Delhi so he’d know, and he even said in February 2022 that “We have no mediation plans for a simple reason: both sides view the territorial dispute between them as a purely bilateral matter.”
This principled position respects those two’s hard-earned sovereignty and recognizes their independent agency in International Relations, which are all the more important for the world’s two most populous countries considering India’s colonial history and China’s Century of Humiliation. They’ve since risen to become leading forces in the global systemic transition to multipolarity and accordingly don’t need anyone to help them resolve their disputes with one another after obtaining such premier influence.
Relations between them weren’t suspended like in the case of Russia and Ukraine so they never even needed a mediator to talk to one another directly about this issue, which their Corps Commanders already did 21 times since their lethal clashes over the Galwan River Valley before finally reaching a deal. It might therefore be that those members of the AMC who believe that Russia “mediated” between them might actually just mean that it could have shared some unsolicited proposals about this instead.
Perhaps that happened during informal talks between their diplomats, but it’s not the same as mediating, and it would certainly have been done with the most careful language possible due to how sensitive the border dispute is for Russia’s top two strategic partners. The high risk of inadvertently offending one of them with a single word, not to mention an unofficial proposal that’s considered by their interlocutor to be an unacceptable concession to their rival, means that this was probably unlikely.
In any case, the question naturally arises of why publicly financed Sputnik would publish Pepe’s claim shortly after Ambassador Alipov clarified that Russia played no role in the Sino-Indo rapprochement, especially since that outlet could have easily contacted the Foreign Ministry to confirm. While it’s possible that the editors simply slacked off on their job, it also can’t be ruled out that this was done deliberately per the “Potemkinist” soft power strategy.
That concept refers to the calculated creation of artificial realities for strategic purposes, especially those that contradict Russia’s official policies and are curiously pushed by members of Russia’s global media ecosystem. This analysis here explained how “Potemkinism” is responsible for the continued proliferation of false perceptions about Russian-Israeli relations (e.g. “Russia is secretly anti-Zionist and working with Iran to militarily liberate Palestine”) in spite of Putin’s proud lifelong philo-Semitism.
Other examples of “Potemkinism” include false claims that Russia was against lockdowns and coercive vaccination policies, supported Armenia against Azerbaijan in Karabakh, and is preparing a first strike against NATO. In this example, the “Potemkinist” narrative is that Russia mediated between China and India, and its laundering through Sputnik imbues it with false credibility due to that outlet being publicly financed and easily able to contact the Foreign Minister to confirm everything before publication.
This isn’t the first time that Pepe and Sputnik have pushed spurious claims about India either. He alleged in his column for them after summer 2023’s BRICS Summit that “India, for a series of very complex reasons, was not exactly comfortable with 3 Arab/Muslim members (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt). Russia assuaged New Delhi’s fears”. Two weeks later, India unveiled the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) in partnership with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, thus debunking the preceding claim.
After all, if there was truth to Pepe’s allegation that India wasn’t comfortable with those three Arab/Muslim countries joining BRICS, then it wouldn’t have partnered with two of them on what was supposed to have been one of its grandest geo-economic initiatives before 7 October offset these plans. It also deserves mentioning that Sputnik then published an interview that was critical of IMEC before republishing a critical Global Times article that shortly followed Putin’s praise of that megaproject.
This sequence of events was analyzed at the time here, but it can be argued in hindsight that this was yet another example of “Potemkinism”, though awareness of this concept hadn’t yet arrived by then. This assessment is based on Pepe’s latest Sputnik column contradicting what Ambassador Alipov had declared just hours prior with regard to how Russia had nothing to do with the Modi-Xi meeting. That “Potemkinist” narrative is meant to exaggerate Russia’s mediation role before the targeted audience.
False claims such as this one and summer 2023’s about India being uncomfortable with Arab/Muslim countries joining BRICS, so much so that Russia supposedly had to “assuage” it in order to secure the group’s second round of expansion, are made in an opinion column and not a Sputnik editorial. For that reason, even though Sputnik laundered these “Potemkinist” narratives about Russian mediation in both cases (respectively implied and then explicitly stated), India can’t do much to set the record straight.
Neither was described as news or as being from an authoritative official, even though they were passed off as facts by Pepe, so the pretext doesn’t exist for diplomats to intervene and request any edits. What was alleged in summer 2023 is indisputably much more offensive than the latest claim since it implies state-level Islamophobia, which India has been accused of before and vehemently denies, yet the article remains unchanged to this day. The latest one will therefore likely also remain unchanged as well.
It only gives false credit to Russia for something that it didn’t do, even though the innuendo of India (and China as well for that matter) requiring mediation could be scandalously interpreted as lacking the diplomatic capability to defend its interests without outside help, so an informal complaint is unlikely. The takeaway for keen observers is that this discrepancy between Pepe’s Sputnik-laundered claim and Russia’s official stance is further proof that the “Potemkinist” soft power strategy does indeed exist.
