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Is Russian Propaganda Pushing the World Closer to Global Conflict?
An alleged assassination attempt that killed the daughter of a key Putin ally is making foreign policy observers very nervous.
In the last days of a free Kabul, just as American forces were leaving and Taliban militants were closing in, Russian media outlets reported that the Taliban offensive in Kabul appeared to be, “winding down,” and, “running out of steam.”
Anyone familiar with the propagandist leanings of the Russia press over the past few years in particular knew what that meant: Kabul was in deadly trouble and was about to fall, spectacularly, to the Taliban.
And so it proved.
Since February 2022, and throughout the invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin’s hold over the Russian “free” press has been so constantly on display, it’s hard to know what to believe about the conflict.
Like Germany with Poland before 1939, Russia has been engaging in a kind of slow-scale invasion of Ukraine for years. The danger signs have been flashing red since at least 2014- and before. Looking back, Putin’s intentions to eventually invade Ukraine were always perfectly clear, in spite of the Russian media’s attempts to obfuscate them.
It seems clear, for instance, in retrospect, that Ukraine’s problems with “corruption”…