The US State Department’s chief spokesman has repeated for days that the US is seeking to lower tensions with Moscow and claimed that diplomacy is still an open course of action. Butt that message may not have made it across the Atlantic to the US’ embassy in Ukraine.
Officials at the embassy, which moved operations from Kiev to Lviv at the direction of the Biden administration as the threat of Russian attacks on the capital have been said to be credible by US officials, posted a meme comparing the two cities of Moscow and Kiev in an apparent attempt to cast Moscow as a city with a less-rich history.
The meme contained no text or captions other than the city names and identifiers of various structures built in Kiev. It was favourited nearly 100,000 times a few hours after its posting, but many questioned whether the US State Department should be spreading such a message especially as the threat of armed conflict grows.
“An embassy that was evacuated several weeks ago trying to dunk on a military invasion with a sassy meme that inadvertently reinforces the adversary's narrative is the culmination of several long trends in American foreign policy, none of them good,” wrote Gregg Carlstrom, a Middle East correspondent for The Economist.
“A conventional Russian account of history holds that Russian civilization originated in 10th century Kiev (as they'd spell it) and that this is why Ukraine belongs forever in Russia's orbit, so I'm not sure why this is an own,” added David Klion, a writer for Jewish Currents.
As recently as this past weekend, State Department spokesman Ned Price and Secretary of State Antony Blinken were touting the agency’s work to “use diplomacy to prevent a war and address security concerns”.
"It's my responsibility to do everything I can to try diplomatically to prevent a war,” Mr Blinken told NBC’s Meet the Press.
On Tuesday, Russia’s Vladimir Putin recognised Ukraine’s entire Donbass region as independent countries, and announced that Russian forces would move to secure their sovereignty. The areas are largely controlled by two separatist governments, but some of the territory is still held by Ukraine’s government.
The development led to President Joe Biden announcing a new range of sanctions targeting Russian oligarchs and financial institutions, while vowing that his administration would work with Germany to kill the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project.
