America the Evil Mastermind? Not So Fast, Russians Are Told

Five weeks ago, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V.Lavrov, delivered a routine speech blasting the “hegemonic, egoistic” United States at the helm of the “collective West.” The worldview of the 74-year-old veteran diplomat has since undergone some head-spinning changes.In an interview on Russian state television on Sunday, Mr.

Lavrov listed the ills that Europe — not America — had brought upon the world.The United States, in his telling, had gone from evil mastermind to innocent bystander.“Colonization, wars, crusaders, the Crimean War, Napoleon, World War I, Hitler,” Mr.

Lavrov said.“If we look at history in retrospect, the Americans did not play any instigating, let alone incendiary, role.”As President Trump turns decades of U.S.

foreign policy upside down, another dizzying swing is taking place in Russia, both in the Kremlin and on state-controlled television: The United States, the new message goes, is not that bad after all.Almost overnight, it’s Europe — not the United States — that has become the source of instability in the Russian narrative.On his marquee weekly show on the Rossiya-1 channel Sunday night, the anchor Dmitri Kiselyov described the “party of war” in Europe as outmatched by the “great troika” of the United States, Russia and China that will form “the new structure of the world.”For more than a decade, the United States was the Kremlin propaganda machine’s main boogeyman — the “hegemon,” the “puppeteer” and the “master across the ocean.” It was seeking Russia’s destruction by pushing Europeans, Ukrainians and terrorists into conflict with Moscow.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

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