Is Greece Becoming a New Russian Satellite State?
by David Patrikarakos
The Kremlin’s strategy of supporting the far left and the far right, playing on resentment of Berlin and Brussels, is bearing fruit.
Just above a designer clothes shop on a main road in downtown Athens, Ukraine’s crisis has come to Greece. While customers browse expensive dresses and high-heeled shoes below, two floors up volunteers pack boots and thermal underwear into boxes to send to Ukrainian soldiers fighting a war just under 2,000 miles away.
But the Ukrainian Diaspora of Greece Volunteers: from Greece with Love is not so well-loved in Greece, in fact. This is a country whose sympathies very largely lie with Moscow and whose new left-wing government is positively cosy with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Maria,” a volunteer who declines to give her real name, is blunt: “In Greece the media always talks about the conflict as a civil war. There is no mention of Russian involvement whatsoever,” she says. “Nor is there any real mention of the Russian equipment and weapons flowing to the separatists. In fact the only mention of weapons is the discussion of the inevitability of the U.S. supplying weapons and special forces to the Ukrainian army.”
“The vast majority of Ukraine reporting on Greek TV comes from Russia,” adds Anna Zaika, a Ukrainian accountant also involved with the group who has been living in Greece for 10 years. “You’ll see a Greek reporter being interviewed about the Ukraine crisis and he’ll be standing in Red Square—it’s ridiculous.”
“We plan to fight on the information battlefield,” says Elena Getseva, one of the founders of the group. “We have to fight for people to know the truth, so we will work with historians and journalists to publicize facts to counteract these things.”
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