The US-led Western Mainstream Media (MSM) has been aggressively pushing the fake news narrative that Russia’s permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (“deep state”) are divided over their country’s ongoing special military operation in Ukraine, even going as far as to speculate that a coup might be in the works and that President Putin is being deliberately misled by his officials. There’s no truth whatsoever to this speculation but propagating it serves the purpose of raising doubts about the government’s unity. That’s intended to prompt panic among the Russian population as well as make Westerners think that their geostrategic opponent is on the verge of political collapse.

Russia’s campaign in Ukraine is an existential struggle to ensure the integrity of its national security red lines in that country in particular and the region more broadly. It’s morphed into an all-of-nation effort to restore global strategic stability, which in turn also involves diversifying its economy and actively engaging with its many partners in the Global South, first and foremost among them China, India, Iran, and Pakistan but also of course Turkey and those countries in Africa and Latin America that practice a policy of principled neutrality towards the Ukrainian Conflict as well. Furthermore, President Putin’s geo-economic judo move of demanding energy payments in rubles prompted panic in the West.

The ruble has largely recovered in the week since to its pre-crisis level while Europe is concerned about an impending economic crisis in the event that its energy imports from Russia are disrupted due to their leadership’s refusal to comply with President Putin’s new decree. The second ongoing phase of Russia’s special operation in Ukraine also proved that its military advance on Kiev was just a distraction this entire time in order to improve the prospects of swiftly liberating the rest of the newly recognized Donbass Republics from Kiev’s yoke with minimal civilian casualties and collateral damage. Russia flipped the strategic tables on the West, which is why its opponents are ramping up their fake news.

They can’t allow the public to acknowledge the fact that the same special operation that they provoked Russia into initiating unleashed multiple unintended consequences that have accelerated the decline of the US’ unipolar hegemony. The alternative reality that these false information warfare narratives create is essentially a coping mechanism for their targeted Western audience as well as a desperate last-ditch attempt to advance the US’ doomed-to-fail regime change plans for Russia. It’s all being propagated from a position of weakness, not strength, otherwise America’s “perception managers” wouldn’t have to push such easily discredited narratives.

Russia’s “deep state” unity stands in stark contrast to that of its Western opponents, especially the US, whose permanent bureaucracies are divided over the increasingly counterproductive consequences of the same sequence of fast-moving events that they themselves provoked. The French spy chief, for instance, just reportedly lost his job due to failing to foresee everything that unfolded over the past month. There are also visible divisions within the US over President Joe Biden’s off-the-cuff remarks during his recent European tour where he seemed to imply that his country might use chemical weapons and that it was contemplating dispatching troops to Ukraine.

No such divisions have been witnessed within Russia’s own “deep state” since its officials are united in purpose over their country’s special operation in Ukraine. Nevertheless, speculating otherwise appears misleadingly credible in the eyes of the unaware Western target audience who’ve been preconditioned to believe in the existence of multiple rifts within the Russian leadership even though those false expectations were themselves part of the US’ information warfare against its own people. The purpose behind that proto-campaign was to subsequently spin everything, including fake news stories such as the ones examined in this analysis, as a “loss” for Russia and a supposed sign of its “impending collapse”.

The US-led West’s overreliance on information warfare against Russia actually adds credence to contrarian claims alleging that the first-mentioned is seriously losing this proxy conflict with that Eurasian Great Power in Ukraine. It wouldn’t have to resort to such a plethora of propaganda if there was plenty of concrete evidence proving that it was “winning”. Objective observers should therefore always consume such Western-originating narratives with a hefty load of salt since there’s a very high possibility that whatever they read from such sources is simply an information warfare product and not an accurate reflection of reality.