Freedom House: Russia is the Biggest Force Against Democracy in Eurasia

Russia saw its biggest loss of democracy in a decade last year, while a new kind of propaganda in the media aimed at foreign Russian-speaking minorities is spreading.

As reports Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), the U.S.-based watchdog group Freedom House stated this in its annual Nations in Transit report, which monitors the democratic development of 29 nations from the former Soviet Union, the Balkans, and Central Europe.

The researchers also point out that other authoritarian states took aggressive action to block efforts to form new democracies elsewhere in Europe and Eurasia

The report notes that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s moves to annex Crimea and back separatists in eastern Ukraine who are waging civil war against Kyiv had a cascading effect of stifling democracy at home and snuffing out freedom and democratic achievements in neighboring regimes

“Russia has been at the center of Freedom House’s narrative, as regards Eurasia, for a number of years,” the report’s author, Sylvana Habdank-Kołaczkowska, told RFE/RL, but last year Russia’s disruptive influence grew exponentially because of the “escalation of Russia’s aggression internationally and the new forms that it took.”

The fallout from Russia’s crackdown on democracy and freedom was felt both at home and abroad.

Habdank-Kołaczkowska refers to this dubious achievement by the Kremlin as the birth of a new kind of Russian propaganda, with Russian state-controlled media broadly disseminating misinformation and targeting mostly countries that have large Russian-speaking minorities.

In general, the trend was negative throughout the whole Eurasian region, the report found.

Twenty years ago, when Freedom House first started rating countries, only three — Belarus, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan — were considered “consolidated authoritarian regimes.” 

That number has more than doubled since then, however, and Eurasia’s average democracy score has fallen from 5.4 to 6.03 on a 7-point scale, the report found.