Moscow is using the weekend to broadcast anti-European propaganda through an ad aired by the Russia Today (RT) channel, which claims that Europeans have had plenty in 2021 and celebrated in the dark in 2022. , and in 2023 they will be forced to eat their pets, BFMTV reports, News.ro reports.

This promotional video, broadcast for the first time in Europe by journalist Francis Scarr from BBC Monitoring, aims to warn European citizens about the energy consequences of the European Union’s (EU) support for Ukraine in the context of which the Kremlin-initiated Russian war has been going on for ten months.

In the first series – a scene of 2021, a family celebrates Christmas, and a little girl receives a hamster with a bow tie as a gift.

The next year at the same time, the girl’s father is forced to build a system to turn a hamster’s wheel into a generator to light the Christmas tree.

In the final sequence, in 2023, the family is apparently living in extreme poverty, in the cold, the father finds a hamster’s bow tie in the soup, suggesting that his wife had to cook the pet to keep the family alive .

“Merry Christmas from the “anti-Russians”! If your media doesn’t tell the whole story, RT is available with a VPN,” he writes at the end of the video.

Russia Today (RT) has been banned in EU countries since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24.

“Russia is not even trying to hide its economic blackmail,” France 24 correspondent Dave Keating and military historian Cedric Maas react.

The EU is vigorously blackmailing Moscow, an important supplier of natural gas to the world, which has been subject to European sanctions since the start of the war in Ukraine and which has threatened to cut off natural gas supplies in retaliation, eventually cutting them off entirely.

In early December, Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened the West to “cut production” of “so necessary” Russian oil, days after the EU, the G7 and Australia set a price ceiling on Russian oil at $60 a barrel in order to limit revenues from Moscow to finance its military offensive in Ukraine.

Europeans are looking to buy more natural gas from other global suppliers such as Norway, Qatar and Algeria after their American ally recently announced it could not significantly increase its liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports. , due to limited production capacity.

The risk of energy shortages concerns several EU member states that have urged their citizens to cut consumption this winter, such as Germany and eastern European countries that are heavily dependent on Russian natural gas.