"RIA Novosti" and "Rossiyskaya Gazeta" published news with the headline "Ukraine is in danger of becoming a desert because of the desire to join NATO." They referred to an article from The American Thinker, written by one Alexander Markovsky.
“And as this failed state, bordered by the Soviet Union, rotten with incompetence and corruption, sinks in blood and destruction, there is a terrible premonition that Ukraine will turn into a desert for many generations to come. So, if Ukrainians deserve a state, they probably really deserve the kind of state that they received, ”RIA Novosti quotes Markovsky.
Russian propagandists often quote Western media to show that people abroad also allegedly support Vladimir Putin and condemn Ukraine. But these “media” often turn out to be marginal blogs that no one reads in the West, except, of course, their authors. American Thinker is no exception. This is a far-right blog that supports racists and anti-Semites and spreads fakes that former US President Donald Trump was "voted stolen" in 2020.
American Thinker rose to prominence in the run-up to the 2008 election for attacking U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama. Even after Obama's election, the site's authors continued to spit out one wild story after another – ranging from conspiracy theories that the real father of the US president is communist activist Frank Marshall Davis, to predictions of a second Civil War and the emergence of "several regional republics" after "imperious, despotic" Obama presidency.
This blog is also notorious for its racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, and anti-Muslim views. One of its most prolific authors, Raymond Ibrahim, wrote more than 100 articles sharply critical of Islam. In 2014, the site published an enthusiastic article about racist and anti-Semite Jared Taylor, and in 2015, the blog found LGBT propaganda aimed at children in Doritos rainbow chips. There were also anti-scientific claims that denied the negative effects of climate change.
In 2020, after Trump's election defeat, American Thinker published many articles that spoke of fraud. The authors used such "irrefutable" evidence as the small number of cars in the parking lot at rallies for Joe Biden (who won the election). The hardest hit was Dominion Voting Systems, whose voting machines were used in those elections. However, when facing legal action from the company, the site's founder, Thomas Lifeson, admitted that his blog relied on "self-discredited sources that circulated debunked theories." American Thinker also published a rebuttal and confirmed that its claims of fraud were "completely false and without any factual basis".
The author of the text about "Ukraine-Desert" Alexander Markovsky also deserves attention. According to the InoSMIwebsite (a project of the Rossiya Segodnya International Information Agency), Markovsky is “a Russian immigrant, lives in the city of Houston (Texas, USA), the owner and CEO of Litwin Management Services, LLC. Born and educated in the Soviet Union, he holds degrees in economics and political science from the University of Marxism-Leninism during the Soviet era and a master's degree in civil engineering from Moscow University."
A political science degree obtained in Soviet times at the University of Marxism-Leninism would undoubtedly be useful for political propaganda in the USSR, but it has little to do with modern political science and international relations. So Markovsky is the owner of a company that probably participated in various projects in Russia, and not a political scientist.
In his free time, however, he writes books about Marxism from old memory and is a senior fellow at the Center for Political Studies in London in New York. It sounds impressive, but "London" in this case is the late founder of the center Herbert London, a conservative and unsuccessful candidate for governor of New York in the 90s, and no one has ever heard of this center, as the Daily Beast found out . . His name surfaced in the early days of the Trump presidency, when the new president began to recruit advisers from among the organization's staff, and the Daily Beast called him "terribly influential." However, now, under the new Democratic president, his "influence" has already been lost.