Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to the United States notably darkened the mood in Russia.
In the run-up to the high-profile journey that clearly irked the Kremlin, Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova claimed that America is just like the Third Reich. Other commentators apparently received the same set of talking points and started to describe the U.S. as a Nazi nation.
In anticipation of the visit, most state TV pundits and experts warned viewers that a decision to allow Ukraine to strike deep within Russian territory is all but imminent. To address these fears, some of the most prominent talking heads are being sent out to convince the population that even long-range strikes are not that big of a deal.
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Tigran Keosayan, husband of Margarita Simonyan—the notorious editor-in-chief of the state-controlled RT network—caused quite a stir when he showed up on Vladimir Solovyov’s show earlier in September and tacitly criticized people who demand nuclear strikes in response to Ukraine’s counter-attacks into Russian territory. Keosayan argued that these kinds of strikes would not imperil Russia’s existence and therefore would not warrant a nuclear response.
Solovyov, who is a known proponent of preemptively nuking Western capitals, seemed to be in shock when he was contradicted on his own show. Since Simonyan is well-connected to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin circles, the talking points her husband was sent to deliver were most likely pre-approved.
For his part, during Solovyov’s state TV program Sunday Evening With Vladimir Solovyov, the host insisted that Russia should deprive Ukraine of any means of generating electricity, including nuclear power plants.
Solovyov even argued that nurseries and kindergartens should be forced to rely solely on gasoline generators. This callous suggestion once again revealed that the Kremlin is giving up on the idea of controlling Ukrainian territories, and thus would rather destroy any modern conveniences than to allow their neighbors to live free of their former Moscow overlords.
After the debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump, most of Russian state TV’s talking heads and experts grimly concluded that their favored candidate, Trump, will most likely fail in his presidential bid, which means that America can’t be expected to abandon Ukraine and simply hand it over into Moscow’s clutches. However, if Trump was to prevail and Russia was able to defeat Ukraine, according to military expert Alexey Anpilogov, “a Russian steamroller” would keep moving throughout Europe and Poland would be next on the Kremlin’s target list.
Before Putin’s troops invaded Ukraine in 2022, Natalia Makeeva, a forecaster from the Center for Geopolitical Expertise, appeared on a show called The Meeting Place and assured viewers that “the absolute majority of the people in Ukraine are pro-Russian” and would meet the invading Russian troops “with sweet bread and flowers.”
During Monday’s broadcast of The Meeting Place, by contrast, political scientist Alexander Sytin addressed the glaring misconception that spurred the Kremlin’s ill-fated invasion. He asked: “Are you still certain, nearly three years later, that they’re waiting for you there, that they love you and are ready to submit to you?”
Host Andrey Norkin bluntly admitted: “It’s not about whether they’re waiting for us or love us, we just have to bring some kind of order there—otherwise they will keep jumping at us.”
“Hold on a second, who jumped on whom?” Sytin replied, amazed by the attempt to blame Ukraine for the war.
On an earlier September broadcast, Sytin threw caution to the wind as he pondered why Russia even launched the invasion given that it isn’t able to gain control of Ukraine by the means of conventional warfare and is most likely unwilling to use nuclear weapons. Putin himself said in 2022 “there can be no winners in a nuclear war” and it “should never be unleashed.”
During Monday’s broadcast of The Meeting Place, journalist Maxim Yusin urged pundits and viewers not to delude themselves and to face reality.
“Let’s come down to earth,” he said, later adding: “This conflict is forever, your grandchildren will still be fighting in it.”
