SUBSCRIBER+ EXCLUSIVE REPORTING — On a Russian TV program recently, Dmitry Novikov, a Russian lawmaker, said that political chaos and divisions in the U.S. were “good for us,” meaning his country and its people. “Destabilization inside an adversary is always a good thing.”
That was before the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.
Kremlin propagandists have seized on Saturday’s shooting in Pennsylvania as the latest example of political dysfunction in the U.S. – themes that Russian media influencers have hammered for years, especially since the February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. After Trump was shot, the Russian Foreign Ministry said American democracy was “on the verge of suicide.”
Within hours of the attempt on Trump’s life, the spigots of Russian media disinformation were turned up to full blast – with three basic story lines: The Biden Administration had enabled or inspired the shooting; the U.S. had actually carried out the attack; or – in a variant that cast blame on two of Russia’s enemies – Ukrainians had conspired to kill Trump, with the help of U.S. intelligence agencies.
It was all baseless, but these theories have reached a nationwide audience in a country where fact-based news about the West is in short supply. While similar false narratives have flowered on American social media platforms, the Russian versions were propagated by government officials and some of the most popular media personalities and influencers in the country.
The Kremlin version of events
For years, Russian propagandists have warned – with no evidence – that members of the Democratic Party were conspiring to kill Trump. At one point they suggested the Russian security services should “start protecting our Donald.”
On Sunday night, Vladimir Solovyov, among the most influential Kremlin-backed media figures, opened his Sunday Evening With Solovyov television show with a reminder that he had predicted that Trump would be assassinated. He then said that unless the U.S. Secret Service was “unprofessional and stupid,” its agents had to have been in on the plot.
Earlier Sunday, in the Kremlin’s first official statement about the attack, President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov echoed those sentiments.
“After numerous attempts to eliminate candidate Trump from the political arena,” Peskov said, “it was obvious to all outside observers that his life was in danger.”
The Kremlin then adopted the line of many Trump supporters, accusing the Biden Administration of creating an atmosphere that had “provoked an attack on (Trump).”
Peskov said Biden and the Democratic Party had provoked the assassination attempt via their failed attempts to oust him from the race, “using first legal tools, the courts, prosecutors, attempts to politically discredit and compromise the candidate.”
Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, picked up the theme and took it further.
“Exactly 2 months ago I noticed that in the United States they are literally encouraging incitement of hatred towards political opponents,” Zakharova wrote on her Telegram channel. She suggested that the U.S. divert the money it has pledged for Ukraine to fund the “American police…and other services that should ensure law and order within the United States.”
Since the invasion of Ukraine, Russian officials – and the state media apparatus – have used every opportunity to criticize the U.S. and the West, and some prominent commentators appeared to gloat in the aftermath of the Trump attack, calling it evidence that the “American type of democracy” was “deeply corroded,” and warning that the end of that democracy was near.
Beyond her obviously influential Foreign Ministry position, Zakharova has a following on the Telegram and Vkontakte platforms of more than 1.5 million. In a subsequent post, she wrote that “All American media and commentators, commenting on the assassination attempt on Trump, are saying in one voice that this is a ‘threat to American democracy.’ I would just clarify that this IS American democracy, which has been driven to a suicidal state by liberalism.”
She added that “the dissolution of the United States does not look like such an impossible prophecy any longer.”
An American on Russian TV
Outside the halls of government, things got weirder.
Margarita Simonyan is one of Russia’s most influential voices – and not coincidentally, one of Putin’s favorite mouthpieces for propaganda. She is head of the RT media empire and her audience on various social networks is estimated to run to the tens of millions. Simonyan said that the attack on Trump bore similarities to the assassination of John F. Kennedy – who she suggested had been killed by elements in his own administration.
“When other ways to get rid of an inconvenient president have been exhausted,” Simonyan wrote on her Telegram channel, “good old Lee Harvey Oswald comes into play.”
Then she added, for good measure, “Watching America is like watching a TV series where the writers have run out of imagination long ago and now repeat themselves from episode to episode, but you already got used to the characters, like you get used to your house slippers, so you continue to watch.”
Solovyov also runs a network – “Solovyov Live” – and this week its Sunday morning program At Dawn hosted an American guest. John Varoli, a former Russia-based journalist who now works in public relations, has often toed a Kremlin line, and he did so on Sunday.
“The Democratic party is behind this attempted assassination,” Varoli said. “The Democratic party is doing everything to destroy Donald Trump. They have been threatening to exterminate him for many years”.
Russia and Putin have been sanctioned and charged in international criminal courts with extrajudicial killings around the world – but now another Kremlin propagandist, the political scientist Sergey Markov, said the attempt on Trump’s life was an example of U.S.-backed “political murder” that might be coming to Moscow.
“The new technology of political murder is creating an atmosphere of total hatred towards some politicians and pushing activists to murder them,” Markov said. “And so they are preparing assassination attempts on Putin, (Hungarian President Viktor) Orban, and (French opposition figure Marine) Le Pen.”
Beyond the absence of evidence in any of these statements, it’s worth emphasizing that all these people and their platforms are hardly on the Russian fringes; they have huge audiences and followings, and little competition from any legitimate unbiased sources of information.
To take another example, Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti, is carried by thousands of local media outlets all across Russia. One of its most-featured “analysts,” Piotr Akopov, wrote after the Pennsylvania shooting that Trump’s political enemies regretted that they “did not kill him before November 2016.”
It was “no surprise” that the Secret Service had failed to neutralize the assassin, Akopov said, as their agents had to have been in on the job. Given Trump’s popularity, he wrote, “killing him has become a scenario with no alternative for the deep state Washington swamp.”
Let’s blame the Ukrainians
It didn’t take long for Russian politicians to find another theory, an example of what is often referred to as “the Ukrainian trace” – the “evidence” of a Ukrainian connection to a crime.
Sergi Tsekov, a member of the international committee of the Council of Federation (the Russian Senate), told RIA Novosti, “Given that the Kyiv regime has repeatedly made very unflattering statements about Trump, who promised to end the military conflict in Ukraine if elected U.S. President, I urge the U.S. authorities to consider the version of the involvement of the Ukrainian special services in the assassination attempt.”
The possible reduction in aid to Ukraine in a second Trump administration, Tsekov added, gave Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky an obvious motive to remove Trump.
Varoli, the American, added his voice to this theory. “In all seriousness, I believe that the Ukrainian special services may be behind this—on orders from the White House.”
Among Russian analysts, the only voices dissenting from the conspiracy theories were those heard outside the country. Vladimir Pastukhov, a prominent Russian political scientist who now lives in London, said Monday that when he heard the news from Pennsylvania, he had wondered immediately whether the Russian media would blame the Ukrainians.
“I just said in the morning that the search for a Ukrainian trace in the assassination attempt on Trump would soon fill all the media space in Russia. Even before this idea came into my head, at least two (Russian) senators…had already expressed it.”
He added that the likely next shoe to drop would be reports in the Russian media of Ukrainian connections to the would-be assassin.
“I think that in the near future, Moscow will fill the social media with installations on the Ukrainian background of the assassination attempt,” Pastukhov said. “They will find Ukrainian relatives, neighbors, girlfriends (of the shooter), they will discover connections with (Ukrainian Military Intelligence Chief Kyrylo) Budanov, they will get secret personal correspondence with Zelensky.”
Another voice outside Russia suggested the political drama in the U.S. was a gift to America’s adversaries.
“This election is doing more to discredit American democracy than Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping could ever hope to,” Sergey Radchenko, a historian at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, wrote on X. “I am worried about the image projected to the outside world.”
Radchenko – like the Russian lawmaker Dmitri Novikov quoted in the first line of this piece – wrote those words before the shots were fired in Pennsylvania.
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