‘They won’t shut up about Greenland’: Meduza obtains the Kremlin’s instructions for state media covering Trump’s standoff with Denmark
Donald Trump’s push for U.S. control of Greenland has triggered a fresh round of instructions from the Kremlin on how Russian state media should frame current events. According to media guidelines obtained by Meduza, state-run and pro-government outlets were told to present the standoff as evidence of a weakening West, a fractured NATO, and an American president borrowing from Vladimir Putin’s playbook. And despite Putin’s public insistence that the Greenland dispute doesn’t concern Russia, the guidelines call for wall-to-wall coverage of the issue. Meduza’s Andrey Pertsev explains how the Kremlin is turning Trump’s Greenland gambit into a propaganda opportunity.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly insisted that Greenland — an autonomous territory of Denmark — should be handed over to the United States. European leaders have categorically rejected the idea, prompting Trump to threaten tariffs on countries opposing his push for U.S. ownership of the island. Then, at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday, after weeks of refusing to rule out the use of force, he said the U.S. wouldn’t seize Greenland by military means. Trump later suggested he would support an agreement that would expand U.S. presence on the island while preserving Danish sovereignty, and said he’d dropped plans to impose higher tariffs on European countries over the dispute.
Russian officials have been watching developments around Greenland closely and commenting publicly. On January 20, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, called Greenland an “unnatural part of Denmark” and a product of “colonial conquest.” The following day, Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev said that Trump “wants to go down in history forever” and “to become like the Russian president.” President Vladimir Putin, for his part, has said that disputes over the island “do not concern” Russia.
But inside the Kremlin, there seems to be a different view. Despite Putin’s public assertions about Greenland, documents seen by Meduza reveal that his administration has sent guidelines to state-run and pro-Kremlin media outlets urging them to give Trump’s bid for control of the island sustained coverage.
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Two media workers — one from a state outlet and another from a pro-government online publication — confirmed receiving the instructions. “They won’t shut up about Greenland — it feels like this topic has become more important than the ‘special military operation,’” one of them complained. According to the journalist, he and his colleagues are now forced to cover every response by American, European, or Russian politicians to Trump’s remarks about Greenland.
The same source believes the aim is to persuade Russians that Western countries are weak — and that there is “nothing special” about Russia’s annexation of Crimea and other Ukrainian territories: powerful states, the logic goes, are entitled to act that way. Coverage is supposed to emphasize that the U.S. president “wants to go down in history as a leader who expanded his country’s territory” and that he is “guided by Vladimir Putin’s success.” And that Trump, like Putin, understands that conflicts with European countries will eventually be forgotten, but “territories will remain.”
The guidance also urges state-run and pro-Kremlin outlets to emphasize that the dispute between the United States and the E.U. over Greenland is “making the West weaker” and that NATO is “falling apart.” Journalists are instructed to present European leaders as incapable of guaranteeing security or stability in their countries without U.S. backing — and unable to articulate a clear position on Greenland. Coverage of the issue should also repeatedly invoke Vladimir Putin, portraying him as a leader who is “forcing America into an equal dialogue,” while European heads of state, by contrast, are “halfheartedly protesting on social media,” flooding the internet with AI-generated videos in support of Greenland.
Pro-government journalists are advised to frame the situation as follows: “NATO is no longer a single, cohesive alliance, but a group of rivals ready to undermine one another.” Outlets are also advised to quote Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, who has questioned NATO’s future and described recent events as “Greenland drama.”
Before Trump scrapped plans to impose higher tariffs on European goods, Russian journalists were additionally instructed to highlight the potential economic damage — between 8 and 15 billion euros ($9.4 to 17.7 billion) — that Germany’s economy would supposedly suffer as a result. Why the guidelines only mention Germany is unclear.
Russian media outlets have already begun following these instructions. RIA Novosti, for example, quoted Igor Shatrov of Strategic Development Fund as saying: “Russia needed to resolve the issue [of Crimea] — and Russia resolved it. The United States is the same: they need to solve a problem, so they’re solving it.” The pro-Kremlin outlet Regnum has reported that “Trump is copying Putin” and quoted political analyst Dmitry Matyushenkov repeating the Kremlin’s talking points: “For Trump, annexing Greenland is a chance to turn the United States into the world’s second-largest country by area.” Komsomolskaya Pravda, meanwhile, cited Lavrov’s remarks included in the guidelines, assuring readers that the “collapse of NATO” is a very real possibility.
Story by Andrey Pertsev