On August 4, 2025, Russia’s state news agency RIA Novosti amplified a Telegram post by Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova claiming Canada has entered a “deep crisis of values” and that the next decade could be “the last for Canada as we know it.” Her commentary amplified disinformation to falsely legimitize and boost fringe separatism movements, and included culture-war tropes, anti-LGBTQ narratives, and “failed-state” rhetoric to depict Canada as fracturing and illegitimate.
Zakharova calls Canada “an extremely diverse, sparsely populated state, without a single idea, except drug ultra-liberalism, is steadily approaching its existential crisis.” While she is correct that Canada is diverse and
These tactics align closely with well documented Russian objectives: to divide Western democracies, exploit sensitive fault lines, and manufacture conflict wherever possible. The explicit targeting of Canada likely signals an escalation of Russian information warfare against Canada and its interests.
Screenshot of August 2025 article featuring Zakharova’s claims about Canada translated.
Who is Maria Zakharova?
Maria Zakharova is the spokesperson and director of the Information and Press Department at Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a prominent leader with the Kremlin administration’s information and influence operations planning team.
Zakharova is the ministry’s public face, she leads regular briefings and shapes the Kremlin’s messaging. The European Union has described her as a “central figure of the government propaganda,” and the US State Department has identified her as “among the most enthusiastic purveyors of Russia’s disinformation and propaganda.” Since February 2022, Zakharova has played a key role in creating and spreading Kremlin disinformation about Russia’s war against Ukraine, including denial of Russia’s well documented war crimes and other mass atrocities committed by members of Russia’s military forces, including the abduction of 20,000 Ukrainian children.
She is sanctioned by the European Union the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. Collectively, these designations reflect her position within Russia’s intelligence, disinformation and influence apparatus, where she functions as the MFA’s primary amplifier of Kremlin narratives in its information and cognitive warfare targeting Canada, its allies and Ukraine. Canadian academics have directly interfaced with her in the past.
What did She say?
Canada is in a “deep crisis of values” and the next decade may be its last “as we know it.”
This is a well worn Kremlin tactical narrative the focuses on Western “decadence” and “imminent failure and collapse of the West.”This framing bundles several long-running pro-Kremlin tropes: the West is morally rotten; liberal rights (esp. LGBTQ) leading to civilizational decay; and that Western democratic states are “failing.” These are often used to position Russia as the guardian of “traditional values” while delegitimizing democracies.
“According to polls, every third resident of Manitoba province no longer sees his future in a single Canadian state”
Zakharova’s claims about Manitoba is a deliberate falsification. The only province-wide poll on separatism in 2025 (Probe Research) asked a referendum question: 70% would vote to stay, 22% to leave, 7% unsure. RIA turns “one in five” into “one in three.”
The objective is to depict a federation on the verge of breakup, validate a “West vs Ottawa” grievance frame, and seed quotable figures that both Kremlin aligned proxies and extremists can recycle.
Russian state media outlet Sputink amplified the fringe WEXIT movment in 2019.
“an increasing number of people do not want to live in a country where the use of heroin, homosexual sport is legalized (the LGBT movement is recognized in Russia as extremist and banned) is being scored traditional, an aggressive campaign is being carried out to popularize suicides among persons who have reached the elderly.”
Zakharova’s claim fuses three panic triggers into an alarmist amalgam designed to stigmatize Canada.
First, the claim that “heroin is legalized” is false: British Columbia’s pilot decriminalized possession of tiny amounts to curb overdose deaths; it did not legalize narcotics, and public use has been re-restricted.
Second, the phrase “homosexual sport is legalized” is an unsophisticated dehumanizing contrivance. Canada protects equality in law and sport; there was never a ban that required “legalization.” Framing LGBTQ inclusion moral collapse is a stock extremist propaganda device. Russia has adopted legislation that has aggressively limited the rights of Russia’s LGBTQ community, adding the community and its members to Russia’s “terrorist list” in 2024.
Third, casting Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying as an “aggressive campaign” to “popularize suicide” deliberately misrepresents a tightly regulated medical framework with defined eligibility, informed consent, and independent oversight. This distortion suggests Canadians are ending their lives en masse with state encouragement, when in reality MAiD is governed by strict safeguards intended to protect vulnerable people and ensure ethical clinical practice.
Headline from an Russian state media RT article targeting Canada’s position on LGBTQ rights. In Russia the LGBTQ community has been designated a “terrorist organization”.
Canada shows “all the signs of “failed state”, including the inability to maintain normal relations with neighbors and the rampant neo-Nazi ideology among the diaspora”
Zakharova amplifies two stock Kremlin tropes- that Canada is a “failed state” and that there exists a “neo-Nazi” diaspora. These are cruedly combined into a single indictment designed to delegitimize Canadian democracy and its minority diaspora groups.
On the first count, the “failed state” label is contradicted by empirical benchmarks: Canada ranks among the top countries in the the OECD’s “Better Life Index”, while Russia ranks among the lowest.
Contrary to Zakharova’s claims, Canada maintains very strong relations with its neighbors: with the United States trade exceeded $900bn in 2024, and with Denmark/Greenland Canada peacefully resolved the Hans Island boundary dispute in 2022—hardly markers of diplomatic breakdown. Canada works closely with its EU allies and as a member of NATO.
False claims targeting Canadian diaspora communities are a staple of the Kremlin’s playbook, which labels adversaries “Nazis” to stigmatize Ukrainians and other Central and Eastern Europeans in the West and to smear Ukraine’s government. The European External Action Service’s EUvsDisinfo has repeatedly tracked this tactic, including Canada focused variants after the 2023 Parliament incident, and Moscow’s systematic misuse of “Nazi” rhetoric to delegitimize opponents – going back to the Cold War.
Why now? Why These Narratives? Why Canada?
Zakharova’s claims follow a formal Kremlin information and influence operations template that was exposed through leaked top secret documents and minutes of meetings between Russia’s Presidential Administration and private Russian communications contractors like SDA and Structura. The documents, included in an FBI affidavit, outline Kremlin information warfare and influence operations objectives and were directed to penetrate Western information environments with the primary objectives of:
- Undermining western support for Ukraine
- Exploiting divisions within Western societies and to use influencers and disinformation to intensify them using the themes in Zakharova’s rant.
- Where no existing divisions exist, they were instructed to manufacture them.
- thematic lines portraying liberal “abstract values” as corrosive, then judge success by whether those narratives are repeated by audiences and media.
Portraying Canada as collapsing is a core Kremlin narrative, and one that the Presidential Administration instructs its contractors to weaponize against broad Western audiences.
Screenshot of a Tenet Media video posted to Rumble targeting Canada.
The same motif surfaced in the Tenet Media case, where Russian state operatives allegedly built a far right online platform to amplify Kremlin aligned anti-Canadian themes. The current push suggests a renewed focus on Canada intended to:
- Undermine the Carney government and disrupt its deepening ties with Europe and support for Ukraine.
- Exploit U.S. “51st state” rhetoric to intensify divisions between Canada and the United States.
- Subvert national unity within Canada to weaken resilience and resolve against future influence operations.
Zakharova’s unexpected anti-Canadian tirade may be intended as a signal to Kremlin contractors, influencers, proxies, and enablers that a new phase of information and influence operations targeting Canada is underway. Canadian officials, media, and elected representatives should prepare for escalation and expect North American Kremlin aligned voices to recycle and amplify these narratives. The response must be steady and disciplined: raise public awareness of these patterns, correct falsehoods quickly without repeating their frames, and work with civil society and diaspora communities to expose manipulation. Raising public awareness will help Canadians spot these operations early and avoid becoming unwitting amplifiers of the Kremlin’s information warfare against our democracy and social cohesion.
