Western goals of shaking Moscow’s image in front of the world

Mahmoud al-Batakoushi

The United States has once again warned its citizens against traveling to Russia, asking those there to leave immediately, about five months after the last call for its citizens to leave the country for fear of security harassment and arbitrary arrests by the Russian authorities.

The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) announced in January that the Russian authorities had opened a criminal case against an American citizen on suspicion of espionage and involvement in intelligence activities for Western countries.

According to Reuters, the US embassy in Moscow said in a statement, “US citizens residing in or traveling to Russia should leave immediately. You should exercise extra caution due to the possibility of unlawful arrests,” adding, “Do not travel to Russia.”

International relations specialists believe that Washington has resorted to issuing these warnings to save face before the Russian successes in the Ukrainian war and its successive acquisitions of land, despite the abundance of military supplies and economic pressures that have cost global economies a lot in light of the energy crisis following the ban imposed on the volume of Russian trade, oil and gas, especially since the volume of spending on the war in Ukraine, according to an American report, amounted to $443 billion, most of which is focused on the amount of American aid provided to Ukraine.

Throwing a ball of fire into Russian territory

Specialists said that Washington is trying to throw a ball of fire into Russian territory with new pressure, attempting to distort Moscow’s image in Western media as an aggressor and suppressor of freedoms, especially after the Russian security services arrested American citizens due to accusations that Washington claims are “false”.

Dr. Basil Al-Hajj Jassem, a researcher in Russian affairs, refuted the American steps of warning its citizens in Russia of the need to leave, seeing it as a Western step to pressure Russia in order to make it appear in a bad position in the media and global political circles as a country that oppresses freedoms led by a president who supports persecution. This has appeared in many points, the first of which is that the Russian-American relations are dominated by many crises due to Washington’s position on the Russian military operation in Ukraine.

The second of these points is that American basketball star Brittney Griner was detained in Russia for more than a month, while the third is that US President Joe Biden described his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, as a “butcher” and “war criminal,” refusing to back down from those descriptions.

The fourth point of the Russian-American dispute is that Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov had earlier described Biden as tired and forgetful. The fifth issue is that Washington’s warning falls under the name of polishing its mental image before the upcoming US presidential elections in light of the Russian-Ukrainian war.

Undermining confidence in Moscow

Jassem confirmed that the purpose of the provocation is to accuse Russia of using weapons of mass destruction in the Ukrainian theater of operations, and thus to launch a strong global campaign against Russia aimed at undermining confidence in Moscow, to the extent of depriving it of membership in the UN Security Council.

The biggest evidence of the distortion attempts, according to Jassem, are the secret documents found by the Russian special forces in the Luhansk People’s Republic, which show Washington’s plans and efforts to destabilize the Donbas regions since 2014 and show systematic work in this regard that was led by the American leadership through USAID, where it gives detailed instructions for managing organized work aimed at discrediting the Russian Federation in the eyes of the local population. In this context, it distributed leaflets with the aim of misleading and distorting the true picture of what is happening in Ukraine, as well as systematic and deliberate incitement to sow hatred between different ethnicities and towards the Russian Federation.

It is noteworthy that the US Agency for International Development (USAID) was established by the United States government in 1961 at the initiative of former US President John F. Kennedy, with the aim of providing emergency humanitarian aid and helping to prevent conflicts in more than 100 countries around the world.