CHICAGO – The Russian media have been talking up war for some time, but it has now reached new heights of warmongering. Dmitry Kiselev, a television journalist known for his close ties to the Kremlin, keeps threatening the West with nuclear weapons. Another ally of President Vladimir V. Putin, the voluble ultranationalist party leader Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, recently declared that if Hillary Clinton were elected, it would mean World War III.
Clearly, the Kremlin is deliberately creating a sense of impending war by having its own media insist that NATO has put Russia under threat – from the military alliance itself and its democratic ethos. Ominously, Mr. Putin loses no opportunity to extol the Russian people’s wartime virtues of heroism and martyrdom.
