Daily: West preparing anti-Russian media offensive in Serbia

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America and its NATO allies are preparing for a fierce anti-Russian media offensive in our country, writes the Belgrade daily Vecernje Novosti.

The paper said it learned that a portion of the USD 250 million that the US Congress has allocated to the Countering Russian Influence Fund for fiscal years 2017 and 2018, will soon arrive in Serbia.

According to Novosti, preparations are in full swing to launch a project dubbed, "Confronting the Russian Disinformation Campaign in the Balkans" - which should start at the end of this or early next year with the launching of "a regional media center for defense and security issues," now under the working name, "The Balkan Security Network."

According to the report, the work on "opposing the Russian information war in the region" - in fact an attempt to establish America's complete control over the media in this area - is being led by John Cappello, senior fellow for military affairs at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and former US military attache in US embassies in Serbia and in Israel, and by Daniel Sunter, director of the Belgrade-based NGO Euro-Atlantic Initiative (EAI).

The project also involves NATO's public diplomacy sector from Brussels and the NATO Liaison Office in Belgrade, while Simon Fitzgibbon, defense attache at the British embassy in Belgrade, plays an important role.

According to the daily, the project will be funded through the Atlantic Council, the German Marshall Fund, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) - which is one of the main financiers of the so-called NGO sector in Serbia - as well as the American (military) command for Europe (USEUCOM).

Diplomatic representatives from Germany, Canada and Norway, as well as Slovenia, are expected to contribute via Colonel (ret.) Anton Tunja, a former military attache of Slovenia in Serbia.

Incidentally, these plans for a Western diplomatic-military propaganda aggression on Serbia are derived from the Countering Iran's Destabilizing Activities Act, adopted in the US Congress on July 27, the article continued.

The act also provides for the establishment of the said anti-Russian propaganda fund of USD 250 million, which, apart from Serbia, should also be used to counter the Russian influence in Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Georgia, Macedonia, Moldova, the so-called state of Kosovo, and Ukraine, as well as in NATO and EU members that are "vulnerable" to said influence.