In 2021, abundance. In 2022, parties in the dark. And in 2023, Europeans forced to eat their pets… In an ad broadcast on the Russia Today (RT) channel, Moscow takes advantage of the year-end celebrations to launch an anti-European propaganda message.
The promotional clip, broadcast 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, at the initiative of the Kremlin, has it lasted ten months.
“Merry ‘Anti-Russian’ Christmas”
In the first sequence, a scene from 2021, a family celebrates Christmas and a little girl receives a gift of a hamster, dressed in 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 wheel into a generator, to illuminate 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 knot in his soup, suggesting that his wife was forced to cook her 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 being broadcast in European Union member countries since the beginning of the Russian invasion.
“Russia is no longer even trying to hide its energy blackmail,” reacted France 24 correspondent Dave Keating, as did military historian Cédric Mas.
The EU is facing energy blackmail from Moscow, a major global gas supplier that has been subject to European sanctions since the start of the war and which in return threatens to disrupt gas supplies, or even cut them off altogether.
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 $60 price ceiling for oil. Russian black gold. Objective: limit Moscow’s income to finance its military offensive in Ukraine.
At the moment, if the French Government has alerted and prepared “for the worst scenario” in the face of the risks of power outages from 2023, no major load shedding has been carried out.
The Europeans, however, are looking to buy gas, in larger quantities, from other world suppliers, such as Norway, Qatar or Algeria, while their US ally has indicated in recent days that it could not significantly increase its LNG exports due to its capacity to limited production. EU members
The risk of energy shortages does not stop at the borders of France and several European states have called on their citizens to show restraint in reducing their consumption this winter. More particularly in Germany and other Eastern European countries, which are highly dependent on Russian gas.
Source: BFM TV
