Another essay

I figured it’d be good to post just one more essay of mine to let you readers know how I’ve done with them. So once again, without further ado – you know the drill:

The article I chose for this assignment was titled “Ukraine should reimburse Crimea for 25 years of ‘unfair treatment’ – Russian Duma speaker” (https://www.rt.com/russia/453948-ukraine-compensation-crimea-speaker/). It was posted to RT on the 15th of March 2019. Interesting and weird thing about the page is that there are no articles that mention the authors of the news – they just are… there. I previously didn’t even know about this site existing, so I had to do some Googling.

RT is an internationally aired Russian tv-news channel, which also provides news about Russia and the rest of the world in English, Spanish, German and Arabic. What rang the bells when looking up information on this site, was the fact that a notable portion of the funding for the foreign-language news comes from the Russian Federation’s budget – that can be seen a bit fishy.

The ABC’s of Propaganda Analysis concludes that there is always some conflict element in all propaganda. Here it is obviously the Crimean crisis, in this case used, in my opinion, as both cause and effect. This subject, the Crimean crisis, is easily one that can get one’s personal opinions mixed in with trying to analyze the situation objectively. So, as the ABC’s of Propaganda Analysis states, one must behold their own reaction to this conflict element. In my own opinion, the whole situation was morally and humanely handled poorly to say the least, so I need and try to place that aside to analyze this objectively. Also, capturing the peninsula doesn’t exactly fit in to the Western thinking, so that needs to be taken in account as well.

Finding the facts behind the claims in the article is vital for drawing any conclusions. The said Russian Duma speaker, whose statements the article is referring to, is a man named Vyacheslav Volodin, a Russian politician and former aide to President Vladimir Putin, who has served as the 10th Chairman of the State Duma since 5th of October 2016. He is justifying the capture of the Crimean Peninsula by implying that things are now better in Crimea than they were under the Ukrainian rule: “Crimea got hospitals, schools, the Crimean bridge, energy [infrastructure] that ensures living a productive life”, he said. He is also using this arguably very clear propaganda to make claims that Ukraine should, along with the EU, pay compensation to Crimea for “suffering big economic losses by being a part of Ukraine”. I find that to be the main proposition of this article, as a hefty part of the article is about money “owed” to Crimea. He uses quite bold words when describing how Ukraine “mistreated” the Crimeans and their rights essentially. Volodin is therefore defending Russia’s actions and basically saying they were right for capturing the peninsula. Again, pretty straight forward propaganda if you ask me.

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