MOSCOW, June 26. /TASS/. Moscow has noticed a surge in the intensity of anti-Russian propaganda in the West that occurred right at the moment when a scandal over the bugging of presidential telephones by the NSA broke out in France, a source at the Russian Foreign Ministry told TASS on Friday.
"Our Western partners are apparently trying to divert attention from the scandal over the NSA spying on the French leadership," he said. "They couldn’t invent anything more sophisticated that to hike the grade of anti-Russian propaganda."
"It looks like they were too pressed for time," the diplomat said.
"For instance, a mythical nuclear threat ostensibly coming out of Moscow is looming large in the major French media for the second day on end and, correspondingly, there’s much talk about an acute need for building up NATO infrastructures in Europe," he said. "The story is peddled in a way suggesting the U.S. has no other choice than to defend its partners."
The interview the Ukrainian Foreign Minister, Pavel Klimkin, gave to Le Figaro on June 25 also happened to be quite instrumental in this context, the source said. "The stale passages about the continuing Russian aggression in Ukraine and supplies of up-to-date armaments systems are seasoned in it with outlandish data on a growing inflow of ‘Russian mercenaries’ who allegedly make up 40% to 45% of fighters in self-defence units (of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk republics - TASS)," he said.
"Once again, there is a conclusion on the importance of building up NATO’s military potential in the eastern regions of Europe in the wake of a loss of trustworthiness by Russia," the source said.
"As if at the drop of a hat, the German media belched out the first results of an investigation over a recent cyberattack on Bundestag," he said. "The guilty ones have been established long before the end of the investigation and surely these are the Russian secret services."
"One of the main objectives of bombarding the Europeans’ consciousness with this agitprop is to take their attention away from the scandal around a new portion of disclosures of the NSA activity towards the French allies," the source said. "The other objective is to show Paris that, like Berlin, it doesn’t have an alternative to beefing up the trans-Atlantic relationships with Washington.".