https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/russia-s-un-ambassador-echoes-trump-s-big-lie-as-putin-faces-global-condemnation-for-invading-ukraine/ar-AAUwovW?ocid=msedgntp
Vladimir Putin and Russia have repeatedly sought to inflame political tensions in the US.
The news also comes as figures on the conservative right have praised Putin both before and after the invasion.
Robert Mueller documented how a Russian troll farm tried to exploit various political issues.
Russia's UN ambassador Vasily Nebenzya echoed Donald Trump's election lies at a UN meeting on Wednesday as the global body overwhelmingly denounced Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
While defending his nation's attack on Ukraine, Nebenzya falsely accused the United States of engineering a coup in Ukraine in 2014.
Nebenzya called the US a country "where the legitimately elected president of the country was overthrown."
The Russian diplomat's false statement recalled former President Donald Trump's debunked "Big Lie." Trump has repeatedly claimed that the 2020 election was fraudulent and that he was the true winner.
Countries at the UN voted on Wednesday to condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine, with just four countries — Syria, Belarus, Eritrea, and North Korea — joining Russia in trying to vote the resolution down.
Trump, who has since claimed his words were twisted, called Putin both a "genius" and "savvy" for how he planned his large-scale invasion. In the past, Putin has offered similar praise for Trump both before he won the 2016 election and after he became president.
"Perfect alignment," Sen. Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, wrote on Twitter.
Trump has refused to concede that he lost the 2020 presidential election and has both pushed and encouraged related efforts to try to question the legitimacy of the results. There was no large-scale fraud that affected the election's outcome. Trump and his allies' efforts have increasingly turned to unprecedented means like a movement underway in Wisconsin to retroactively pull back the state's 10 electoral college votes. Biden was the certified winner of Wisconsin and there is no mechanism through which a state can claw back its votes, especially after a president has been inaugurated.
Putin and Russia have repeatedly sought to inflame political tensions in the US. Last year, Putin sought to downplay the Capitol insurrection saying people who ransacked Congress in an effort to delay the certification of Biden's victory "weren't just a crowd of robbers and rioters."
"They weren't just a crowd of robbers and rioters. Those people had come with political demands," Putin said at the time. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also worried about the "persecution" as US law enforcement moved to investigate and charge those who participated in the insurrection.
Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election was aimed pretty transparently at exploiting the domestic political debate. Special counsel Robert Mueller found that a Kremlin-linked troll farm began a yearslong effort to masquerade as US political activists.
"IRA employees operated social media accounts and group pages designed to attract U.S. audiences," Mueller wrote in his report. "These groups and accounts, which addressed divisive U.S. political and social issues, falsely claimed to be controlled by U.S. activists."