Bloomberg: Putin's Lies Influenced Republicans' Blocking of Aid Package to Ukraine

For many years, armies of trolls and bots under the command of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin have been waging an active information war against the US and other Western democracies. And Putin's tactics seem to be working. Evidence of this is the aid package for Kyiv, which has been stuck in Congress for half a year. One of the reasons for the delay, which is costing Ukrainians lives every day, is that Putin's lies influenced the views of some Republicans in Congress - not many, but enough to cause problems, according to Bloomberg.

The most influential "useful idiot" (a term dating back to the Soviet era) expressing Putin's narratives is, of course, former President Donald Trump, who increasingly frequently calls and gives direct instructions to his Republican allies in Congress. Discerning and dismissing disinformation from any source is the only way to counter this threat, as shown by another Republican, Ronald Reagan, in the 1980s.

Back then, the Kremlin's disinformation machines were already actively working. In 1983, the KGB published a fabricated story in the compliant and little-known Patriot Magazine in New Delhi. The lie was that the US government had created the AIDS virus to kill African Americans and gays.

Reagan presented this lie to Mikhail Gorbachev, and the Soviet leader publicly apologized. The similarity to current events is that even debunking did not prevent millions of people from believing this nonsense and continuing to believe it to this day. Russia always hides and denies its role in spreading lies, allowing "useful idiots" in the media or among politicians of the target society to spread it.

Previously, it was reported that US presidential candidate Donald Trump hopes to initiate negotiations between Russia and Ukraine to cease hostilities. This is stated in a CNN article.

According to the publication, many European ambassadors allegedly learned that Donald Trump wants to promote the idea of a "two-tier NATO": so that countries spending less than 2% of GDP on defense would not be protected by Article 5 of NATO.

Foreign diplomats, the article notes, have heard Trump's plan to end the war in Ukraine, which involves Trump seating Moscow and Kyiv at the negotiating table and urging them to reach an agreement to cease hostilities.