MOSCOW, September 12. /TASS/. Efforts by a number of Western countries to influence the September 8 elections in Moscow are flagrant and unacceptable, Head of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Information Problems Department Ilya Timokhov said on Thursday. He was speaking at a meeting of the working group of the Interim Commission for the Protection of State Sovereignty and the Prevention of Interference in Russia's Internal Affairs at the Russian Federation Council (upper house).
"We regret to say that our Western partners continue to pursue a policy aimed at meddling in Russia’s domestic affairs. Blatant attempts to influence the election campaign continued during pre-election silence and even on election day. We believe that our opponents’ failure to comply with the underlying international legal norms, as well as generally accepted rules and ethics for covering domestic political processes, on the eve of and during election day are totally unacceptable," he stated.
The diplomat shed light on the fact that some leading Western media outlets bankrolled by the US, the UK, Germany and Canada used a massive, unscrupulous media blitz to inculcate Russian citizens with "a biased, negatively-charged slant of domestic political events in Russia distorting reality." He noted that they again resorted to media manipulation and doubletalk.
In particular, that was what Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Deutsche Welle did, Timokhov went to say.
He noted that Western journalists did not rely "on the principles of impartial journalism and non-interference in domestic affairs," but instead promoted Alexei Navalny’s ‘Smart Voting’ strategy and called for using the same tactics during Russia’s 2021 parliamentary election.
"We insist that Western countries use the same principles of non-interference in internal affairs they practice with respect to each other. Double standards on this score are utterly unacceptable," he concluded.