A story allegedly from the national daily newspaper USA Today is being spread on Russian social networks, which states that an American food blogger was blocked on a streaming platform “for preparing Russian dishes”.

“A girl with 1.2 million subscribers was left without a channel and income because she dedicated an episode to making dumplings, borshch, and told how she had a great trip to Russia and got acquainted with Russian cuisine”, the propagandists say.

But there was no such story on the pages of USA Today. Moreover, using a reverse Google search and the query “YouTube blocked a blogger for a video about cooking a Russian dish”, the search engine only shows publications from pro-Kremlin media that translate their materials into English. That is, it is most likely that such news is simply made up.

And in fact, a conditional video or channel could be blocked if it violated YouTube community rules. Definitely, a channel could not be deleted because of a “video about a Russian dish”.

Thus, propagandists promote a narrative about the existence of so-called Russophobia, which Moscow fights against and protects its citizens. The Kremlin media puts the meaning of another term into the word Russophobia, namely xenophobia — a sharp rejection of another culture, language, and way of life that can manifest itself in the political life of a state through discrimination based on national and cultural grounds. The meaning of this word, in a much narrower sense, is hidden behind the term Russophobia, according to Russian propaganda. Russia also justifies its attack on Ukraine with so-called Russophobia.

Russia presents Russophobia as a separate type of Nazism that originated in Ukraine and is spreading en masse around the world. Anyone who criticizes Russia is a Russophobe, and therefore a Nazi. At first, the disinformation message about Russophobia was aimed mainly at the Ukrainian audience, but after the world community supported Ukraine in the war, it spread to European countries. It even went as far as accusing Israel of Nazism.