In weird Torygraph ... news?

[riley@toot.cat]

In weird Torygraph ... news? ... that might be the rare non-Russian disinfo about Russia's warlike activities:

Russia is sending migrants through underground tunnels from Belarus into Europe as part of its hybrid war on the West.

Belarus, a Russian puppet state led by dictator Alexander Lukashenko, has used specialists from the Middle East with “a high level of expertise” to design the tunnels, Polish officials have told The Telegraph.

[...] And while experts say it is hard to be sure which groups were involved, they have suggested Kurdish fighters, Islamic State and Iranian-backed proxies as potential culprits.

To me, the claim seems a lot like a paranoid xenophobic fantasy of somebody who feels that it's presence of immigrants that's the prob;em, and since they believe that Lukashenka is a Bad Person(tm), he would, obviously, do things that feel bad to the paranoid fabulist. It's also possible that the paranoid ideation is not of the creator's, but of the target audience's.

In the real life, Belarus has dispatched migrants to the Polish border, but the operations' value for Lukashenka is not the migrants' presence in Poland, but the high-profile press events about them seeming like crossing, or about to cross the border. Covert border-crossings would make the whole affair pretty much worthless for him.

Furthermore, even if such crossings were to take base, the jump to attribution seems awfully dubious, and may come out of a standard Western paranoid xenophobe's fantasies about Muslims being Designated Bad People, or, as above, may be carefully designed to appeal to Western paranoid xenophobes who have such prejudices against Muslims.

Archived Torygraph article, because bad actor: https://archive.is/BTM5j

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@riley «Middle Eastern specialists» also sounds very «Palestinian terrorists, but I don't want to write that, and I know you can infer it»

[riley@toot.cat]

One of the weirdest things about Russia's relations with European far right is, while "great replacement" is, in general terms, nonsense, USSR's history genuinely include some episodes that resemble the GR narratives. They were usually euphemised as "ethnicity / nationality policy", and they involved #massdeportations, especially deporting people from the Soviet-occupied countries in Europe to the east of Urals, and counterwise, mass transfers of people who may have other ethnicities before but who got described, and sometimes self-identified, as Russophone after the fact in the reverse directions. American fans of "great replacement" don't seem to be very aware of them, but European near-Nazis bring these things up as "examples of the great replacement being real" with annoying regularity.

This pattern is a significant part of the reason why several areas of Ukraine were dominated by Russophone and sometimes Russian-identifying citizens of Ukraine: these areas contain large mineral deposits, so extraction and industrial facilities were built there, and Stalin & co transferred large numbers of people from other places controlled by USSR to work in these facilities.

A somewhat similar large-scale transfer was arranged by Putin for shipping large numbers of supposedly loyal Russians to Crimea after Russia occupied it.

These transfers are not the whole reason, though. Another part of the puzzle is, in times of (relative) relational calmness between the countries, there's oftentimes functionally been a linguistic and, to some degree, cultural, slope between East Ukrainian people and West Russian people. Numerous people have even had two names, one in Ukrainian, one in Russian. For just one example, the Ukrainian spacenautics expert behind the original Sputnik moment, Serhiy Korolyov (Сергій Корольов) often figured as "Sergey Korolev" (Сергей Королёв or Королев) in Russian, and because of the Russian supremacism of USSR, Soviet, documents.

OTOH, when things get ... let's say, not quite so calm, people's need to get off the slope and define themselves as one or the other tends to suddenly go sharply up, and one of the curious outcome of the last of these waves (there have been several between Ukraine and Russia over the centuries) is, there's now a large number of families who live, or used to live, near the border, where some people self-ID as Ukrainian, and some, as Russian. In other words, in the border areas, many Ukrainian people now have Russian relatives, and vice versa. Such families are rarer in West Ukraine, which, in turn, contributed to the relatively lower prevalence of people who consider themselves Russian in the West Ukraine than in the East even before the latest active phase of Russia's 2014 war on Ukraine.

[riley@toot.cat]

@oblomov Yep. Kind of "flows naturally" from the big brouhaha about Palestinian tunnels.

Btw, fun fact: North Korea is known to have high-level expertise for tunnel construction, and also known to actively trade in humans with Russia recently. Coincidence? Could be. Why didn't it come up in this article's speculative attribution section? I submit, it's most likely because the bog-standard Western xenophobe is not as used to thinking of North Koreans as Designated Bad People as they're used to so thinking about Muslims, especially Middle Eastern looking ones.