Perhaps Vladimir Putin has been spending too much time following @LibsofTikTok, the notorious American Twitter account with 1.9 million followers that amplifies crazy social media posts by extreme, LGBTIQA+ activists and practitioners.
Or, more likely, he thought strategically before delivering his address to the Russian nation about how he could appeal to powerful elements in the US Republican Party who loathe woke culture, and have offered ambivalent support, at best, for President Joe Biden’s backing of Ukraine.
“Look what (the West) are doing to their own people; it is all about the destruction of the family, of cultural and national identity, perversion and the abuse of children, including paedophilia, all of which are declared normal in their life,” Putin said high up in his speech, attacking a caricature of Western decadence.
The Kremlin knows it needs Republicans to lose interest in backing Kyiv to have any hope of prevailing in the year-long conflict, and Putin didn’t want for trying to create the impression he’d be a MAGA voter.
The share of Americans in favour of helping Ukraine with weapons dropped from 60 per cent in May last year to 48 per cent in the latest Associated Press-NORC poll conducted late last month, including a drop for Republicans from 53 per cent to 39 per cent across the period.
“Millions of people in the West realise that they are being led to a spiritual disaster; frankly the elite appear to have gone crazy, and it looks like there is no cure for that,” Putin said, in remarks that could have featured among far-right Republican talking points.
“They are forcing the priests to bless same-sex marriages,” he said, singling out the Anglican Church in particular for canvassing the idea of a “gender neutral god”.
Defence of the traditional family and attacking the growth of woke culture in schools and universities have become tenets of the Republican Party in the wake of Donald Trump, whose diehard supporters have offered the least support for US involvement in the war.
“Ukraine is not our friend, and Russia is not our enemy,” far-right Republican Paul Gosar tweeted on Monday during Biden’s surprise visit to Ukraine.
Ron DeSantis, the high-profile Republican governor of Florida and a potential contender for the party’s presidential nomination next year, this week offered less than enthusiastic support for the emerging US proxy war with Russia and potentially China in what were his first public remarks on the conflict.
“I don’t think it’s in our interest to be getting into a proxy war with China, getting involved over things like the borderlands or over Crimea,” DeSantis said on Monday.
Putin’s lengthy speech extolled the virtues of Trump’s economic policies too as he instructed his government to explore “additional measures for speeding up the de-offshorisation of the economy”.
“We avoided having to apply excessive regulation or distorting the economy by giving the state a more prominent role,” Putin boasted, in a nod to small-government aficionados in the Republican Party.
In February 9 a small group of 10 Republicans in the US House of Representatives proposed a Ukraine Fatigue Bill that would have ended US “military and financial aid to Ukraine and urge all combatants to reach a peace agreement”.
It didn’t go anywhere; the Republican leadership in congress has remained steadfast in support for the Biden administration’s efforts for now. But that could change depending on how the war pans out, the state of the US economy and how Trump, actively campaigning for the presidency once again, declares his hand.
“Putin never, ever would have gone into Ukraine if I were president,” Trump told supporters at a Palm Beach, Florida rally on Monday, without revealing how he would proceed now that the Russian President has.
If the war drags on until next year, Trump will have to.
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