Countries that see themselves as victims can be exceedingly dangerous

Notes on a Conspiracy

by Barbara Frye

The global conspiracy against Russia proceeds apace.

Ratings agencies, the UN, Hollywood, the Saudis – are they all against Russia?

It’s hard to say when exactly it began, but the most recent salvo was the decision this week by Standard & Poor’s to lower the country’s foreign-currency bonds to “junk” status.

Apparently, that was not down to the increasingly limited room for a government squeezed between sanctions and plunging oil prices to bolster the Russian economy, as the ratings agency claimed. Instead, it was “politically motivated,” according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov, although he did not say to whose politics Standard & Poor’s was playing handmaiden.

A week earlier, Michel Kazatchkine, the UN secretary general’s special envoy on HIV/AIDS in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, said dozens of drug addicts had died in Crimea since Russia annexed the peninsula and banned the methadone treatment they had been receiving under Ukrainian law. Kazatchkine said addicts had committed suicide or overdosed and that others were at risk of needle-borne disease as they turned back to street drugs.

Russian health officials disputed the statistics; to the Foreign Ministry, it was a case of bad faith. Kazatchkine’s assessments were “politically charged” and aimed for “cheap propaganda effect,” according to the ministry.

And a few days before Kazatchkine made his remarks, Russia’s culture minister told the Izvestia newspaper that Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Golden-Globe-winning, Oscar-nominatedLeviathan, which tells a tale of corruption in a provincial Russian town, would not have “received so many prestigious Western awards” had it been set in the United States, France, or Italy.

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