In a promotional clip for the Russia Today channel, which is circulating on social media, the Kremlin suggests that Europe is living in the dark and that the situation will only get worse next year.
In 2021, abundance. In 2022, parties in the dark. And in 2023, Europeans forced to eat their pets… In an advertisement broadcast on the Russia Today (RT) channel, Moscow takes advantage of the end-of-year celebrations to send out an anti-European propaganda message.
The promotional clip, relayed for the first time in Europe by BBC Monitoring journalist Francis Scar, is intended as a warning to European citizens about the energy consequences of the European Union’s support for Ukraine, while the war, on the initiative of the Kremlin, has lasted for ten months.
“Merry ‘Anti-Russian’ Christmas”
In the first sequence, a scene from 2021, a family celebrates Christmas and a little girl receives a hamster as a gift, wearing a bow tie. The following year, at the same time, the little girl’s father was forced to build a system to transform the hamster’s wheel into a generator, to light up the tree.
In the last sequence, in 2023, the family obviously lives in destitution and the most total cold. The father then finds the hamster’s knot in his soup, suggesting that his wife was forced to cook their pet to survive.
“Merry ‘anti-Russian’ Christmas! If your media doesn’t tell you everything, RT is available through a VPN,” the clip reads. As a reminder, Russia Today (RT) has been banned from broadcasting in member countries of the European Union since the start of the Russian invasion.
“Russia is not even trying to hide its energy blackmail anymore,” reacted France 24 correspondent Dave Keating, like military historian Cédric Mas.
The EU is facing energy blackmail from Moscow, a major global gas supplier targeted by European sanctions since the start of the war and which in return threatens to disrupt the gas supply, or even cut it off completely.
In early December, Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened the West to ‘cut production’ of Russian oil ‘if necessary’, days after the EU, G7 and Australia introduced a price cap $60 Russian black gold. Objective: to limit Moscow’s income to finance its military offensive in Ukraine.
For the time being, if the French government has alerted and prepared the minds “for the worst scenario” in the face of the risks of power cuts from 2023, no major load shedding has been carried out.
The Europeans are however seeking to buy gas, in larger quantities, from other suppliers around the world, such as Norway, Qatar or Algeria, while their American ally has indicated in recent days that it could not not significantly increase its LNG exports due to their limited production capacity. EU members
The risk of energy shortages does not stop at France’s borders and several European states have called on their citizens to show restraint in order to reduce their consumption this winter. More particularly in Germany and in other countries of Eastern Europe, which are very dependent on Russian gas.
War in Ukraine: Russian television uses Christmas as a propaganda object against Europe