Russian ambassador dismisses embassy protesters as ‘frost people’

Russia’s ambassador to Ireland has dismissed protesters outside his country’s embassy in Dublin as “frost people”, a Russian phrase used to describe a sort of thug.

In an interview on state news broadcaster Channel One, Yury Filatov used the phrase отморозки (otmoroski) люди. Google translate the word otmoroski as “thugs” and the term is frequently used to describe those who do not obey the rules.

Without identifying any particular protesters, Mr Filatov complained that the embassy on Orwell Road in Rathgar had been targeted with paint and that a truck had rammed the gate.

Though a Garda patrol has been on a constant posting outside the embassy since, Mr Filatov added that “the cops don’t pay any attention to how aggressively tuned Irish people are”.

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Diplomats were targeted when they left the embassy compound and requests for protesters to move to the other side of the street were ignored, he said. “In our opinion, they are frost people for whom it doesn’t really matter whether it is about Ukraine or not. They were told to go and make a row.”

Mr Filatov was speaking during a report about a pro-Russia protest outside the GPO on O’Connell Street on Saturday, August 6th, organised by pro-Russian groups from Britain and Ireland. One group, calling itself the Council of the Russian Compatriots in Ireland, said the gathering was to protest against the “genocide” of the Russian-supporting people of Donbass which has been going on since 2014.

[ Six months of protests at Dublin’s Russian embassy: ‘We have other things to do but this is more important’ ]

On its Facebook page, it said it was also against the “collective west-sponsored criminal Russophobic regime of Zelensky, which kills civilians with western weapons and the children of Donbass”. The gathered people also protested against the expansion of Nato. And some politicians have been urged to remember that Ireland is a neutral state.”

Though small, the protest made the main evening news in Russia. The presenter stated that those who wanted to know what had been happening in the Donbass since 2014 came to the rally. She said Ireland was typical of European countries where “Russophobia is now the norm, where threats against Russians is also the norm for Europeans now, and swastikas, on the contrary, are not condemned in a society that calls itself civilised”.

Bullying, she added, was a “tool against those who have opinions different from the official one”.

The TV package showed footage of the pro-Russian car rally this April in Dublin and one of its participants, Yuriy Larigin, complained that he had “2,000 threats” as a result of having the letter Z on his jeep, the symbol of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“I got threats they will burn my jeep, destroy me and other threats I don’t want to publicise. And why is that? Because the Ukrainian embassy resented we did a car rally against Russophobia in Ireland.”

Among those who attended the rally were a number of members of the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP), which has been supporting Russia’s actions in Ukraine from the beginning. It has described the Ukrainian government as a “Nazi regime which seized power from the elected government in Ukraine in 2014”.

Among the members of the IRSP present was Nathan Hastings who was given a 10-year sentence in Northern Ireland in 2014 for possession of a firebomb, arms and ammunition with intent to endanger life. He was released in 2018.

He told the programme that most people in Ireland “don’t even know what is really going on in Ukraine. When the special operation began, I guess people don’t understand why that happened.”

At the beginning of the conflict in February of this year, Mr Hastings stated on his Facebook page that those opposed to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine were “either stupid or are neo-Nazi sympathisers. There is no in between.

“People saying ‘oh civilians and children are suffering’ should take their grievances to the doors of the EU, US and Nato who started this war using neo-Nazis as their foot soldiers.”