The Kremlin has condemned the West for providing Kyiv’s forces with tanks, but the Russian information space is playing down the significance that the armored vehicles could have on Vladimir Putin’s invasion.
Moscow’s envoy to Berlin, Sergey Nechayev, denounced as “extremely dangerous” Berlin’s move to send 14 Leopard 2A6 tanks to Ukraine, a decision that will pave the way for other European countries to do the same.
This was followed by President Joe Biden announcing that the U.S. would provide 31 M1 Abrams battle tanks. Konstantin Gavrilov, who heads Russia’s delegation at the OSCE Forum on Military Security and Arms Control, called on the West to prevent “nuclear provocations” with the Leopards.
However, domestic messaging has played down the vehicles’ threats, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters the plan was “a failure in terms of technological aspects,” as well as “a clear overestimation of the potential that this will add to the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” state news agency Tass reported.
Meanwhile, some Russian military bloggers (milbloggers) have tried to reassure their domestic audiences by saying previous Western systems like HIMARS posed more of a threat, having previously framed the defensive Patriot missile systems as a serious escalation.
The fact that the tank provision wasn’t framed as escalatory “suggests that the Kremlin and the Russian information space continue to selectively choose which systems to frame as an escalation,” the ISW said on Wednesday.
This showed that the Kremlin and milbloggers are more focused on “calming potential fears of the impact of Western commitments to supply Ukraine with tanks than with feeding the escalation narrative in the West,” the U.S. think tank added.
Russian newspapers have also compared Berlin’s decision to supply the tanks with the World War Two conflict fighting Nazi aggression.
One headline in the mass circulation tabloid Moskovskiy Komsomolets said: “German tanks are again moving across on Russian soil,” in a piece that said “these supplies will not save Ukraine.”
An article in the government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta, a publication that reflects Kremlin thinking, suggested that Russian forces could handle the tanks.
SOURCE: newsweek.com
