Gilets jaunes: grassroots heroes or tools of the Kremlin?

Russian media have seized on the yellow vest protests – but they don’t seem to have played a role in their genesis

Russian state television has spent much of the last two weeks playing up the chaos of France’s protests, continuing a trend of coverage that emerged long before troll factories and the modern era of “fake news”.

Seven years ago, the Kremlin-backed TV station Russia Today went all in on coverage of a leftist street protest in the west. Did Occupy Wall Street fit the Kremlin’s interests of showing a western nation in (relative) chaos? Yes. But at that time, few would have suggested that Occupy was anything but a genuine protest movement.

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