Press. voanews.com/
Catalonia’s secessionists, who are trying to
organize an independence vote from Spain on Sunday, may be getting aid from
Russia as part of the Kremlin's ongoing strategy to destabilize the European
Union, according to European Union analysts. Spain’s central government has
deployed thousands of police to contain expected disorder. They have threatened
local officials who support the referendum with stiff fines and jail. Spain’s
constitutional court has declared the pending vote illegal.
Despite what some see as a heavy-handed
response by Madrid, the United States and most EU governments have backed
Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy in his efforts to keep Spain united. Russian
state media have disseminated reports consistently favorable to Catalan
independence in a move some analysts consider to be Moscow’s latest attempt to
interfere in Western electoral processes.
The Kremlin has taken no public position on
the referendum, calling it an “internal" matter for Spain. Russia’s use of
hacked information and dissemination of “fake news,” however, has been detected
in recent Western electoral events, including the 2016 U.S. elections,
Britain's decision to leave the EU, or Brexit, and the just-concluded German
elections.
“It's not that Russia necessarily wants the
independence of Catalonia. What it’s principally seeking is to foment divisions
to gradually undermine Europe’s democracy and institutions,” said Brett
Schaffer, an analyst of the Alliance to Safeguard Democracy, a project
supported by the German Marshall Fund, which monitors pro-Kremlin information
networks.
The Russian social media outlet Voice of
Europe (@V_of_Europe) has run such headlines as “The EU refuses to intervene in
Catalonia even as Spain violates basic human rights,” calling Catalonia’s
referendum “a time bomb that threatens to destroy the EU.”
The internationally broadcast Russian
Television, or RT, alleged on September 20 that a “state of siege” has been
imposed on Catalonia and dubbed cruise liners chartered to house additional
police agents being deployed to the Catalonia as “Ships of Repression.”
The Russian digital newspaper Vzglyad borrowed
a page from the Western media’s treatment of uprisings against Soviet
domination in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, with the September 20
headline “Spain brutally suppresses the Catalan Spring.”
Some editorials and Kremlin-sponsored
academics took note of how the U.S. and EU neglected to recognize a
Russian-sponsored Crimean referendum approving reunification with Russia and
compared that with their current indifference toward the Catalan vote.
Catalan secessionist politician Enric Folch,
who is international secretary of the Catalan Solidarity Party for
Independence, has said on Russian media that a Catalan state would support
Moscow in world forums and recognize the independence of territories of
Abkhasia and South Ossetia, which separated from Georgia with Russian support. Folch
was a star participant at a Kremlin-sponsored conference of independence
movements in Moscow last year.
David Alendete, an investigative reporter with
the newspaper El Pais, said the conference was organized by a Russian lawyer
who is defending Russian computer hackers arrested in Spain and is wanted by
the FBI in connection with the hacking of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential
election campaign in the U.S.