How Western media colludes with tiny Navalny-linked group of doctors to weaponize Russia’s Covid-19 battle
9 Apr, 2020 15:19 / Updated 6 hours ago
AFPTV / Romain COLAS
If you know the country well, you will know this: There are two Russias – the one 146 million people live in, and the fantasy version Western media outlets describe.
Both exist in parallel universes. This is why most English-speaking Russians usually react with a mixture of shock and horror when their language skills become proficient enough to read what the foreign press is writing about their homeland.
Now, predictably, Russia’s response to Covid-19 is being weaponized as part of the mythical ‘information war’. This is because Western media coverage of the country generally isn’t about journalism; instead, it’s about activism. This means that only Russians who fit its narrative are given agency.
For this reason, Alexei Navalny is presented as the “opposition leader,”despite the fact there is no united opposition in Russia, and other oppositionists have never selected him to lead them. To make it even more ridiculous, Navalny’s support lies at between one and two percent in Russian opinion polls – considerably behind Pavel Grudinin, for example, who basically doesn’t exist to consumers of the Western press. Grudinin is a former Communist Party presidential candidate, and when Russian outlets reported that he was blocked from entering parliament (the State Duma) last year, US and UK media essentially ignored his travails, presumably for fear of disrupting its narrative.
To appreciate the strange symbiosis between Navalny and the Western media, we need to look at maneuvering around the Covid-19 pandemic. Eager to find a way to attack the official response, some hacks have attached themselves to the Doctors Alliance – a tiny, yet influential, motley crew ‘union’ of medical workers, closely linked to the man himself. So much so, in fact, that it’s led by Navalny’s former personal ophthalmologist Anastasia Vasilyeva.
On the other hand, Russia’s biggest medical union – the Health Workers Union of the Russian Federation (HWURF) – is entirely anonymous in Western coverage, despite its membership totaling around three million.
Breaking rules
First, a disclaimer: A politically active workers union is nothing bad. In fact, it is undoubtedly a positive – as is any genuine desire to help out a medical system that is often critically understocked and has the potential to be entirely overwhelmed by the coronavirus.
The fact is, after almost three decades of hyper-neoliberal economics – initially egged on by the West – working conditions for doctors in Russian state hospitals are generally poor. What’s more, nobody can deny that many hospitals in the country need a lot of help to get up to a reasonable, acceptable standard.
Thus, this argument isn’t about unions as a concept, and does not assert that there are no problems with the Russian healthcare system. There are many. Instead, it’s about a group of activists masquerading as a ‘union’, who are not actively seeking to improve the life of doctors. Instead of actually helping out, Vasilyeva’s associates seem to be more interested in wooing the West.
On April 3, Vasilyeva and eleven other colleagues set off for Russia’s Novgorod Region, about 400km away from Moscow, ostensibly to deliver much-needed personal protective equipment for overworked doctors. Vasilyeva’s group broke strict quarantine laws, designed to stop the spread of Covid-19, to bring boxes of material – masks, respirators, and suits – to two local hospitals. The funding was collected as part of a new project called the ‘All-Russian Medical Inspectorate,’ which says it aims to supply doctors with vital equipment.
However, at the entrance to the town of Okulovka, just inside the state (oblast) border, the Doctors Alliance convoy of four cars, with three people in each (so much for ‘social distancing’), was escorted by local police to the station, where they were kept overnight.
All because Vasilyeva is the most prominent critic of Russia’s response to the coronavirus?
Well, that’s what you’d think if you relied on Western media to explain Russia.
In reality, the story is quite different.
Vasilyeva left her home in Moscow, a city now under strict quarantine with over 6,000 reported Covid-19 infections, on the pretext of providing medical care. As she has no registration in the Novgorod Region (which has 12 registered coronavirus cases), she knew she would be breaking the law before she had even crossed the regional frontier. It was publicly broadcast that Novgorod is presently locked down, due to fear of infection.
Thus, it’s clear Vasilyeva was fully aware she would be arrested. Indeed, the makeup of her eleven comrades essentially betrays that fact: it included a lawyer, a foreign reporter, and three cameramen, rather than a full complement of working, unionized doctors.
Aside from breaching coronavirus rules, she was also charged with disobeying the requests of a police officer – not getting out of her car and refusing an instruction to come to the police station to make a report. According to the Doctors Alliance, her arrest was “real fascism.”
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