Leonid Bershidsky wonders:
Most Russian media are now under his control, and Ukrainian media were steamrolled by former president Viktor Yanukovych. Dozens of small, unreliable sites provide too much noise and too little in the way of verifiable information. Besides, there is the Russian bureaucracy with its own signals on Ukraine: The Federal Migration Service recently reported that 143,000 Ukrainians have asked for asylum in Russia in the last two weeks.
In his phone conversations with foreign leaders, Putin uses all his eloquence to defend the state-controlled media’s uncomplicated view of the situation, as if his interlocutors had no other sources of information but Russian TV.
It’s enough to make you think that hermetically sealed-off paranoid tryants are not always the best judges of their own interests, doesn’t it?
The Dish 