On February 22, 2022, two days before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the self-proclaimed President of Belarus Oleksandr Lukashenko, Putin’s henchman, addressed the Ukrainian people and the country’s leadership with a call that “the Slavic peoples must live in peace and harmony”. At the same time, he suggested that Ukraine “should brush aside its overseas masters”, since they supposedly would not bring any happiness to the Ukrainians.

Russia claims that Ukraine cannot resolve a single important issue of its domestic and foreign policy without agreement with its “overseas masters”. And on one Russian website they even offer synonyms for this phrase: “Western leadership”, “agents of influence”, “a sect of lepers, rootless parasites”.

By the term “overseas masters”, propagandists mean “Washington and London”, in particular, because of their allegedly selfish policy towards Ukraine for quite a long time. However, Ukraine is an independent and sovereign state, and the reproaches of propaganda depending on Kyiv from the “overseas masters” are aimed at declaring the fictitiousness of the Ukrainian government and discrediting it in the eyes of the whole world. In addition, in this way Russia wants to assert that Ukraine is a country of error (“country 404”), and therefore its existence as a whole is supposedly unacceptable.

The assistance provided to Ukraine by the United States and Great Britain can be measured in tens of billions of dollars. They transfer weapons and military equipment, therefore, as a result, they allegedly allow themselves to set a “simple task” for Kyiv: to fight at any cost. Ukraine, in the eyes of propaganda, is a chessboard and supposedly realizes the interests of its “overseas masters”. All its actions are the fulfillment of the will of the latter, and the Russian-Ukrainian war is a proxy war, and not a struggle for independence and upholding the Euro-Atlantic course. According to the conclusions of Russian propaganda, the West’s position regarding Ukraine is aimed at destroying Russia, and so it is “defending itself”. Moscow's retaliatory rhetoric serves as yet another justification for bloody aggression and an unprovoked war.

Yes, without the military support of the West, it is unknown whether Ukraine would have survived the war against Russia. At the same time, this does not give grounds to assert that the Ukrainian state is subject to someone “from overseas”, since it defends the democratic values of the entire civilized world and that is why allied countries continue to support it.