Kremlin media has launched a propaganda blitz claiming a Russian student in Scotland is being harassed because he supports Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine.
Major news outlets, including Moscow’s biggest tabloids, are running stories saying a young man called Andrey Komarov has been victimised at Edinburgh University.
In reporting which echoes official Kremlin talking points about Russians being bullied abroad, several major newspapers quote Mr Komarov alleging his marks had suffered thanks to his “patriotic positions”.
The stories, firmly aimed at a Russian domestic audience, come more than a year after the first reports of tensions between pro-Putin students and Ukrainians and their supporters at Edinburgh after the outbreak of full-scale war nearly two years ago.
Ukrainian students at the university as early as late 2022 said Russian claims of victimisation had been “incredibly upsetting and traumatising”.
Now latest headlines thrust the Scottish capital in the centre of a major propaganda narrative around the alleged mistreatment of its citizens abroad.
Mr Komarov claims a campaign of harassment against him was orchestrated by Ukrainian students and Russians and others critical of the Putin regime who tried to get him expelled.
This came after he tried to celebrate Russia’s biggest military parade of the year and then denied some of the best documented atrocities of the conflict, the rape and murder of civilians in the town of Bucha outside Kyiv.
