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The dramatic events in Russia in recent days have been extraordinary. Vladimir Putin’s government faced the prospect of an armed rebellion, led by mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, who appeared headed for Moscow before halting the advance.
Prigozhin is reportedly headed for Belarus, though the crisis has left questions about the Russian leader’s authority and the stability of his authoritarian regime. There’s also ample speculation about the degree to which Putin’s domestic challenges will affect his war in Ukraine.
Not surprisingly, President Joe Biden and his national security team are deeply engaged in the developments, though as NBC News reported yesterday, the American president has chosen strategic silence.
Biden has not given a public statement in response to the armed rebellion, in the belief that Putin would point to any statement as proof that the White House was orchestrating the uprising in Russia, a White House official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk freely.
This, of course, was a sensible approach. A foreign adversary faced a serious domestic threat, so it stood to reason that the United States would say very little, since it would only help Putin if Prigozhin and his forces were seen as acting on behalf of the West.
It was against this backdrop that some voices on the right thought the smart thing to do would be to start peddling conspiracy theories about the developments in Russia.
On Saturday, for example, Fox News’ Rachel Campos-Duffy questioned whether the United States was involved in the Russian crisis, adding that she doesn’t trust what she hears from the United States government. A day later, Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo was even more direct on this point, arguing that the threat of a Russian civil war was part of an elaborate scheme to shift attention away from Hunter Biden.
“The White House wanted to give the media something else to cover, and this is the m.o.,” Bartiromo told viewers. “This is exactly the way they do things.” She added that the State Department was “drumming up all the drama” about a possible coup effort in Russia.
This wasn’t limited to conservative media. Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia — who’s been accused of being a part of Congress’ so-called Putin Caucus — published a tweet on Saturday afternoon that read, “After our government has been funding a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine for over a year, I sure hope our government isn’t behind a coup attempt currently happening in Russia. Regime change in a nuclear armed country may lead to terrible consequences the American people don’t want.”
Just so we’re all clear, let’s go ahead and note two obvious points. The first is that as conspiratorial ideas go, this one appears to be especially bonkers. None of the people peddling the theory have pointed to anything that even resembles evidence; they simply see value in reflexively looking for ways trying to undermine their own country’s White House.
The second is that the rhetoric could prove dangerous. Putin is the only real beneficiary of loud voices in the United States raising the prospect of American officials trying to destabilize Russia.
If GOP leaders have the courage and wherewithal to denounce their base’s conspiracy theories, now seems like an excellent time to speak up.
Postscript: Donald Trump, whose affinity for Putin is no secret — he spent four years going to almost comical lengths to make Vladimir Putin happy, to the point that his own director of national intelligence later admitted he feared Trump had been compromised by the Kremlin — had little to say about the dramatic developments in Russia.
The former president did, however, briefly suggest that he preferred to see Putin remain in power in Moscow. “A big mess in Russia, but be careful what you wish for,” Trump wrote on Saturday. “Next in may be far worse!”