Russian President Vladimir Putin during a news conference in Moscow. Reuters/Maxim Zmeyev With the old Confederate battle flag very much in the news as a result of the shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, last week, politicians across party lines are rushing to consign the symbol of Southern secessionism to museums, rather than to state capitols in former Confederate states.

But support for the secessionist cause still remains strong in … the Kremlin.

In a piece published in Politico, reporter Casey Michel outlines the deeply strange connection between the Texas National Movement, a group advocating that Texas break away from the Union, and authorities in Russia.

Nathan Smith, the self-described foreign minister of TNM, has been welcomed at far-right rallies in Russia and feted by state media for describing the US as being "not a democracy, but a dictatorship."

The Kremlin has also apparently harnessed its considerable army of internet "trolls" on various platforms globally to gin up discussions of Texas eventually seceding from the Union.

References to Texas have become strangely common in statements of Russian officials, up to and including President Vladimir Putin, who, as Michel notes, in a rambling speech to the nation in December accused the US of "grabbing" Texas from Mexico. (Texas, in fact, established its own independence from Mexico, establishing the Republic of Texas in 1836, nearly 10 years before voting to join the US.)

According to Michel, Texas isn't the only place in which Russia is encouraging separatist movements. Calls in Scotland, Venice, and Catalonia to secede from the UK, Italy, and Spain, respectively, have also received support.

But Texas is by far the favorite target, and that is largely because it helps feed a storyline that Putin has been pushing for more than a year now: that the US is deeply hypocritical in condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine's Crimean peninsula last year and the Kremlin's continued support of separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine.

By invoking the memory of a revolution that took place 180 years ago — and didn't actually involve the United States — Putin has sought to draw a sort of moral equivalence between his actions in Ukraine and the US' annexation of Texas in 1845, 10 years after the foundation of the Republic of Texas by its own citizens.

The Kremlin, however, may be overestimating the alienation that Texans feel. Three of the past nine US presidents, for example, have been from the state, and two more Texans, Rick Perry and Ted Cruz, are vying to win the White House in 2016.

Perry, probably the highest-profile advocate for his state, has made it clear that secession isn't really in the cards. "We've got a great union," he said during his most recent presidential run. "There is absolutely no reason to dissolve it."