Vladimir Putin’s empire of lies

According to Russian state television, flight MH17 was shot down by Ukrainian government forces who believed they were targeting Vladimir Putin’s jet returning from a summit in Brazil. An unnamed Spanish air traffic controller allegedly overheard two Ukrainian fighter pilots talking about the secret operation at Kiev’s Boryspil Airport. Ukrainian jets were supposedly seen tailing the doomed flight just before it exploded. Or, no — the plane was actually downed by a surface-to-air rocket fired from Kiev-controlled territory. Russian spy satellites recorded the whole incident, apparently. Sorry, scratch that: according to the Donbas Republic’s self-declared minister of defence, Igor Girkin (nom de guerre Igor Strelkov), the Malaysian Boeing was actually filled with dead bodies. ‘A significant number of the bodies weren’t fresh’ when they fell from the sky, Strelkov told Russian TV viewers. He also claimed that many of them had been ‘drained of blood’ and ‘stank of decomposition because they had been dead for days’. The whole incident was a plot cooked up by Kiev to discredit the separatists. ‘They are capable of any baseness,’ he said.

Indeed: the Kremlin-controlled media seem capable of any baseness in their rush to deflect blame and scramble the minds of their audience with conspiracy theories. Russia’s official media have been bending the truth to order for decades — apart from a brief and chaotic respite in the 1990s. But in recent months Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine has gone to a new level of credibility–defying cynicism. The kind of stories it is prepared to create to obscure the truth of what happened to MH17 — and what’s going on in Ukraine in general — have left the realm of spin and entered the fantastical.

Last week, Russian TV viewers were horrified by a report from Russian Channel One’s Rostov-on-Don bureau on atrocities apparently committed by the Ukrainian army.