WALER: Canadians pay for Russian propaganda

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This week, a documentary called “Russians at War” is showing at the Toronto International Film Festival. This film is little more than Russian propaganda by another name.

Shockingly, this film has received over half a million dollars in direct Canadian government support from federal and provincial sources. More than $340,000 was provided by the Canadian Media Fund, $70,500 came from Ontario’s education broadcaster TVO, while British Columbia’s equivalent gave an unspecified amount plus an assortment of tax credits covered one-third of the movie’s $1.5-million budget.

Effectively, Canadian taxpayers have unwittingly paid to produce propaganda for Vladamir Putin’s Russia.

Propaganda isn’t always obvious to the intended audience. Sometimes it comes in the form of a friendly, anti-war activist journalist. Sometimes it disguises itself as condemnation of the thing it’s actually designed to promote.

Take this film for example: It tells the story of Russia’s illegal war on Ukraine from a Russian perspective. It paints Russian soldiers as warriors with a conscience; that they’re victims of Putin’s lies, and ironically, Russian propaganda. It explains how they were duped into the terrorist invasion of a sovereign country.

In defence of funding the film, TVO repeated the filmmaker’s claims that it was an unauthorized documentary, has an anti-war perspective and was made at great risk to the crew and production team. These claims were made by the filmmaker in interviews she gave with Canadian media earlier this month.

The problem is that in interviews she gave in Russian earlier this month, she acknowledged that the highest brigade commander of the unit “didn’t forbid” her filming or joining his men “on the front line.” He even, by her own account, issued her a military uniform to wear while filming.

The question obviously is this: Why would Russia want a story like this told? The answer is simple: Look at who the audience is. This film is not being shown in Russia to change the hearts and minds of Russians. It’s being shown in the West, so that viewers, like the taxpayers who ponied up $340,000 in Canada grow critical of their governments for providing lethal aid to Ukraine’s Armed Forces. Because, simply, these Russian soldiers are nice guys who have been misunderstood.

The documentary leads the viewers on a journey to believe that these Russians are victims too — cannon fodder for Putin himself. The problem is that soldiers like the ones featured in this movie also rape, pillage, burn, shoot and dismember Ukrainians. Curiously, that didn’t make it into the documentary. The filmmaker in fact, says she saw no evidence of war crimes.

Ultimately, our tax dollars funded someone to illegally enter Ukraine with Russian troops. The film manipulates the viewers into thinking their Russian perspective is important to sympathize with, so that our bleeding western hearts do what we can to protect Russians soldiers too. All the while, they continue to kill innocent Ukrainians, they continue to bomb schools, hospitals and playgrounds, they continue to kidnap Ukrainian children from their mothers’ arms, and they continue to torture Ukrainian prisoners of war.

Russia has cleverly figured out that if Western audiences can separate the soldiers from Putin, they will advocate for their protection and for the “war to end,” not for “Ukraine to win.” Russia wrote the book on propaganda. They are masters of this art. We, the taxpayers of Canada, are nothing more than useful idiots.

Imagine for a moment, our tax dollars paid for an embedded camera crew with Hamas on Oct. 7: To film it from their perspective. Or back in the Second World War, if our tax dollars funded a film to show the Holocaust from the perspective of the concentration camp guards, filming it in real time. The Russians soldiers occupying Ukraine have raped, burned, shot, chopped up and mutilated Ukrainians — children, women and elderly — for the last two years. They are terrorists, and now their story is being funded by us. It’s sick.

— Laryssa Waler is a Conservative strategist, former Executive Director of Communications to Premier Doug Ford, and Founder of Henley Strategies. She has been personally sanctioned by the Russian Federation.