ABSTRACT
A Washington Post headline “Ukraine Decries Russian ‘Invasion’,” typified mainstream Western press’s demonization of Russia, treating a coup regime as though it spoke for the entire country, whereas in reality it spoke for only a subset of the population, mostly from Western Ukraine (Parry 2014b). The media followed the lead of Washington whose administration was keen to legitimize the illegitimate. Indeed, Washington was party to the illegitimacy, having openly encouraged the protests that led to the coup. The tactics of the Western legitimization campaign included: (1) attempts to blank out or downplay the presence of fascists among leading parties to the coup; (2) staging, at unseemly speed, the coup regime’s Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s formal welcome at the White House as early as March 12, 2014; (3) pretending that the concerns of ethnic Russians in Ukraine’s east and south were merely the outcomes of Russian propaganda and manipulation; (4) maintaining that calls for secession of Crimea from Ukraine were illegitimate (even while bolstering the pretense of the legitimacy of the coup regime in Kiev); and (5) pompously calling for and enacting sanctions targeted against specific Russian leaders as punishment for their supposed malfeasance. While WMM more or less uniformly deplored Russia’s “invasion” of the Crimea, they often seemed incognizant of the fact that the alleged invasion involved little by way of military forces crossing an international border (Parry 2014m). Rather, Russian troops were already stationed in Crimea, legitimately, under a long-standing agreement with Ukraine’s government.
