Agitprop —
"They don't know how to get back. We ask you to help them."
Enlarge / Screenshot from Putin's squad video on bringing Starliner's astronauts home.
One of the odder propaganda phenomenon in Russia, of late, is seemingly spontaneous groups of elderly Russian pensioners gathering outdoors and espousing some random bit of agitprop.
From a Western perspective, these are obviously staged and hilarious to behold. For example, last year a very earnest-looking group of elderly women, and a few men, urged Russia to "take back Alaska" in an attempt to preserve the United States from fascism. One of the women in the video also advocated for a military alliance with Mexico, saying, "In order to effectively fight fascism, we must establish military relations with Mexico to prevent the fascism from spreading further. We must form a military alliance with Mexico."
There are entire Telegram channels devoted to these "Putin's squads" videos, and you can find them on YouTube as well. It is not clear whether these "man on the street" videos are having any impact on Russian opinion, but evidently someone in the Kremlin believes they are helping to shape domestic opinions.
They would probably be invisible to audiences outside Russia, except that a former member of the Ukrainian Parliament, and adviser to the government, named Anton Gerashchenko has been sharing these videos on his Twitter and Telegram social media accounts with translations. His intent is to highlight the ridiculous lengths to which Russian propagandists will go.
Yes, there’s a space angle
All of this is pretty banal as propaganda goes except for the fact that on Monday, Gerashchenko shared a video on Telegram of senior citizens imploring Russian President Vladimir Putin—or in their words, dear "Vladimir Vladimirovich"—to rescue NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who are presently residing on the International Space Station.
These concerned citizens from Krasnodar, a city in southern Russia, are apparently really emotionally invested in the fates of the two American astronauts. (And they definitely aren't reading off cue cards.)
"There are two American astronauts in space right now," one man says. "They have been in trouble for two months. Their Boeing broke down on the way. The engines failed, they somehow made it to the International Space Station. And now they don't know how to get back. We ask you to help them."
These Putin squad members assert that only Russia can help to bring Wilmore and Williams home. One theme of the video is that the two astronauts should not be treated as hostages, as they "are not to blame for Biden's aggression." Another woman adds that time is of the essence because Wilmore and Williams "have been in space for a long time at their advanced age." Wilmore is 61 years old, and Williams is 58.
There are a lot of things wrong here, but let's start with age. How old Wilmore and Williams are is inconsequential, as they're both healthy. Moreover, one of the three Russians in orbit, Oleg Kononenko, is 60 years old and has spent nearly 1,100 days in space, accumulating far more time in orbit than either of the Americans. Where is the concern for Kononenko's age and radiation exposure?
What was once true no longer is
Perhaps most amusingly, the Kremlin continues to peddle the lie that Americans are reliant on the Soyuz rocket and spacecraft to get to and from the International Space Station.
For a long time, this was true. In the aftermath of the space shuttle Columbia tragedy in 2003, two NASA astronauts in orbit who were scheduled to return to Earth on a future space shuttle flight, Ken Bowersox and Don Pettit, instead came back to Earth on a Soyuz spacecraft. For a couple of years after Columbia, the Soyuz was NASA's only ride to space for crew, and this happened again for nearly a decade after the space shuttle's retirement in 2011. If you ask NASA, they'll say the Russians were essential and reliable partners.
This gap in US spaceflight capability was also a potent tool for Russian propaganda. In 2014, amid tensions over Russia's takeover of the Crimea peninsula, a Russian defense official named Dmitry Rogozin, said that if the Americans did not like what Russia was doing in Crimea, they could use a "trampoline" to get their astronauts to the space station. Even a decade later this remains one of the best space trolling posts of all time.
Since then, however, Rogozin and the Russians who seek to leverage the Soyuz spacecraft for propaganda purposes have gone back to this well too many times. As recently as 2022, Rogozin was criticizing US launch vehicles by calling them "broomsticks."
This was just dumb, and conveniently ignores the rise of SpaceX. With its primary "broomstick," the Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX has launched more than 80 missions so far in 2024. By contrast, the entirety of the Russian space enterprise has a total of nine orbital launches.
SpaceX and the Falcon 9 have also been launching NASA astronauts (as well as some Russians) to the International Space Station since 2020. Because of this, and contrary to the views of Putin's squad in Krasnodar, NASA has a viable means of getting Wilmore and Williams home. If necessary, they will ride home on the Crew-9 mission that is due to launch next month.