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A botched debut: Russian propagandist Dmitry Kiselyov tries his hand at debunking fakes
The Insider
In his weekly “Vesti Nedeli” news digest this past Sunday, Dmitry Kiselyov began making a show of debunking what he presented as fakes. He warmed up with an article by German journalist Gabor Steingart about common misconceptions in the Western press — misconceptions that, according to the Kremlin-backed host’s stated opinion, may have been deliberately fabricated. In particular, Kiselyov stressed the impact of the entertainment industry on election results in democratic countries, returned to Kamala Harris's presumed chances of winning the presidential race in the run-up to this past November’s vote, and called into question Germany's economic successes. Kiselyov then decided to continue the list of supposed “hoaxes” in the Western media:
“The list of man-made Western myths, aka fakes, could easily go on. Angela Merkel, for one, wrote in her memoirs that she is afraid of dogs. In 2007, the cruel Vladimir Putin received Madame Chancellor at home, intimidating her with his Labrador Koni. Poor Frau had to sit with her legs tucked up in fear. But wait a minute: here's Merkel in 2016 playing with a very similar Labrador, shaking its paw affably. Or was it Putin who cured her fear of dogs? One way or another, why did Merkel need to demonize Putin in retrospect — even if it were through his dog? She must have had her reasons.
But it's a small thing. Let's bend a few more fingers to count the misconceptions deliberately nurtured in the West.
- Russia started the war in Ukraine in 2022. No one in the West mentions the 2014 coup d'état orchestrated by the West, the Georgian snipers, the military campaign in Donbas to kill Russians. ...
- Russia interferes in elections in the U.S., Moldova, Georgia, and Romania. Romania even canceled the results of its elections under this pretext.
- The Nord Stream pipelines were blown up by Ukrainian saboteurs. Cute.
- It is the Ukrainians, authorized by the U.S. and England, who are firing long-range ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles at Russia. What a stupid thing to say! The Americans and the Brits do everything from processing their own intelligence to targeting, to mission planning, to hitting the “launch” button.
- Ursula von der Leyen: “American gas is cheaper than Russian gas.” Just words, nothing to back them with. ...
And here's the latest: the American THAAD air defense system can shoot down the Russian Oreshnik hypersonic missile. It can't. It is common knowledge that the U.S. does not have hypersonic missiles in service. Without hypersonic missiles, there can be no hypersonic anti-missiles. And even if there could be, how could such a missile hit the target, if the warheads of the separating head part of the Oreshnik each follow a random, whimsical, unpredictable trajectory?
The deliberate myth of THAAD's miraculous capabilities is just a way to reassure the public and strengthen faith in American weapons. They also have to sell it and make money.”
Curiously, the statements “refuted” by Kiselyov turned out to be not so false after all. The Insider has already verified the story of the Labrador whose paw Angela Merkel shook during her visit to Italy. A brief recap: the Labrador, Leo, is a search and rescue dog who found a child beneath the ruins of a house destroyed in an earthquake and became a hero in the Italian press. Merkel knew she was interacting with a trained rescue dog — one who would certainly not behave aggressively — and was thus able to overcome her well-known phobia. Merkel's fear of dogs, which the future chancellor developed after being bitten during a childhood bike ride, has long been common knowledge in Germany.
Moving on, we of course can concede that Russia’s war in Ukraine did indeed begin in 2014 — when Russia seized Crimea and provided direct military support to separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk. In 2022, when Russian troops marched across the border to take Kyiv “in three days,” the war simply entered a new phase.
But let us remain in 2014 for a bit. Ukraine’s revolution of dignity, which preceded the seizure of Crimea and which Kiselyov calls a coup, could hardly have been organized by the West. In fact, the protesters on Maidan actually rejected a proposed crisis settlement agreement that had been concluded with the participation of the EU, Germany, and France due to the fact that it allowed for President Yanukovych to retain at least some of his power for several months before early elections could be called. Ukrainian opposition party leaders agreed to these Western terms, and it was Ukrainians themselves who found them unacceptable — not Western capitals or journalists.
As for elections, the facts of Russian interference in democratic contests have been proven — both through cyber attacks, as in the United States, and through direct bribery of voters, as in Moldova. An investigation led by U.S. special prosecutor Robert Mueller found in 2019 that Russia had interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to help Donald Trump, although no clear evidence of a criminal conspiracy between Trump himself and Russian representatives was found.
With Nord Stream, Kiselyov commented on the story that Ukrainian saboteurs organized the explosions of pipelines with only one word: “Cute.” The Russian host appears to doubt Ukraine's ability to carry out an operation that requires only a few charges of explosives and a handful of skilled divers, even though the details of the operation have already been established and its organizer, a colonel in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, is known.
Similarly, Kiselyov does not believe in the AFU's ability to use long-range missiles supplied by the West, arguing that the Americans and the British can execute such missions, but the Ukrainians cannot — even though Ukrainian military personnel undergo special training from Western representatives before receiving each new type of weapon. As for long-range missiles specifically, Bild am Sonntag wrote in September that if a decision were made to transfer Taurus missiles to Ukraine, the training would take about three months. Ukraine received its first ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles back in 2023, and it is strange to assume that the AFU still does not know how to handle them.
On hydrocarbons, Ursula von der Leyen's statement that U.S. natural gas is cheaper than Russian gas concerned liquefied gas specifically (for obvious reasons, this is the only possible way for the U.S. to export gas to Europe). LNG prices are consistently lower on the U.S. Henry Hub exchange than on the European trading point TTF, so there is nothing strange in von der Leyen's words.
And last but not least, the hypersonic hysteria. Oreshnik is a medium-range ballistic missile. The THAAD system can shoot down such missiles at altitudes of up to 93 miles (about 150 kilometers), above the Karman line — the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and space. Since the missile would be shot down in space before its head part separates, the unpredictable trajectory of its warheads has nothing to do with THAAD capabilities. Israel's Hez-3 anti-missile system has the same capability, and it successfully shot down a ballistic missile in space while repelling an attack launched from Yemen in November 2023.