Ever since then Maidan revolution of dignity erupted in Kyiv in November 2013, Russian propaganda has been pumped into the world in a steady stream of bilge reminiscent of what spewed out of Germany in the 1930s. That propaganda has come through governmental and putatively independent channels, through senior Kremlin officials, TV outlets like “Russia Today,” and Russian internet trolls. Most unfortunately, it has come from senior officials of the Russian Orthodox Church, who have too often misrepresented what the Kremlin is up to in Ukraine while slandering Ukraine’s Greek Catholic leaders with false accusations of Russophobia.
This mendacity is bad enough in itself. Its distortion of international public life is intensified, however, when ignorant, naïve, or duplicitous western reporters and commentators take these lies at face value and repeat them in their own work. One outrageous example of this unhappy phenomenon appeared in a recent issue of the Tablet, the London-based Catholic weekly that reaches a global audience. There, in an otherwise insightful article, writer Jonathan Luxmoore recycled Russian Orthodox Metropolitan Hilarion’s demonstrably false charge that Greek Catholic leaders in Ukraine has “used openly Russophobic rhetoric,” thus making it harder to heal historical wounds. Then Mr. Luxmoore proceeded to make matters worse:
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