If you think that a rogue state on the verge of systemic breakdown would have more important things to worry about than its image, you’d be wrong. Once again, the Kremlin is accusing its critics of something called “Russophobia.”

As Tom Kent, a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, recently put it, “In Russia’s view, the Western world has a big problem: It doesn’t like Russians. The reason, in the Kremlin’s telling, is not Russia’s devastation of Ukraine or its nuclear threats. Instead, the culprit is ‘the propaganda of Russophobia, unleashed by the West.’”

According to Russian propagandists, Russophobia manifests itself in the form of “hate speech.” Thanks to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, we have an extensive list of supposedly Russophobic hate speech from 2024 and 2025.

Here is a typical example, by that notorious Russophobe, former President Joe Biden: “The fact is that Putin is a war criminal. He’s killed thousands and thousands of people. And he has made one thing clear: He wants to re-establish what was part of the Soviet Empire. Not just a piece, he wants all of Ukraine.”

If that’s Russophobia, then all rational people........

© The Hill