Obama Goes on a Brief, Factually Inaccurate Rant About Russia

Tensions are high between the U.S. and Russia,
and President Barack Obama didn’t do anything to ease that this
weekend by belittling Russia with some questionable claims.

In an interview with The Economist this
weekend, Obama shirked any blame for crumbling U.S.-Russian
relations and segued into downplaying the other nation’s global
significance. To back this up he
said:

Immigrants aren’t rushing to Moscow in search of opportunity.
The life expectancy of the Russian male is around 60 years old. The
population is shrinking.

Not one of these sentences is true. Writing for Forbes,
Mark Adomanis, an evenhanded American expert on Russian affairs,
points out the “pretty startling amount of factual inaccuracy.” He

debunks them in turn:

One of the first things that anyone notices when they are in
Moscow is the enormous number of immigrants
from Central Asia. Probably the single most noteworthy and
inescapable feature of modern Russian life is the prevalence of
hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who have already
rushed to Moscow “in search of opportunity.” It’s impossible to
miss them.

This is corroborated by both official Russian government
statistics and the work of its domestic political opponents.

With a dollop of snark, Adomanis explains that “life
expectancy… isn’t a subject of conjuncture or obscure
philosophical inquiry, it is a number that is very easily found on
the public-facing website
of the Russian state statistics service.” And again, Obama is
wrong:

In 2013, the average male life expectancy in Russia was a little
bit above 65 (technically it was 65.14). When Obama says that life
expectancy is “around 60″ he’s off by about 8 percent. With a
similar margin of error we could say that Barack Obama is the 41st
president of the United States, that he won 47 percent of the vote
in the 2012 presidential election, and that he was born in 1957.
Eight percent is a margin of error that people rarely feel
confident using, because it very quickly makes you sound rather
ill-informed and ignorant.

Regarding the population, Adomanis suggests that “US political
elite almost always make huge mistakes when talking about it,” as
“Russia’s
population is not shrinking, it is growing.” And it has been
every year since 2009.

It’s bizarre that Obama criticized Russia on these fronts when
there’s plenty of legitimate issues – like Moscow’s crackdown
on civil rights, the
pro-Western political opposition, and
independent media – that he could have addressed instead.

These, of course, don’t have much bearing on the war Russia is

waging against Ukrainian sovereignty or the
mass killing of civilians on a Malaysian plane, but whether
it’s due to a lazy team of fact-checkers or deliberate rah-rah
nationalism to boost the U.S. by comparison, dubious talking points
don’t help the Obama administration resolve the current crises.
Hearing the president say “Russia doesn’t make anything” will only
inflame anti-American sentiment among Russian civilians, thereby
reinforcing Putin’s own ballooning cushion of popular
support. And, there’s need for healthy debate about the U.S.’s

actions against the Kremlin throughout this war, but by
spouting some easily-debunked information, Obama effectively
invites skepticism of the accuracy of other White House claims
about Russia.