John Kerry has a nice phrase. The west will respond to Russia’s 19th-century behaviour with 21st-century tools. The US secretary of state is missing something. Leaving aside whether Europeans can summon the political will to impose serious economic costs on Moscow for its march into Ukraine, there is another dimension to the conflict. Vladimir Putin has been winning the propaganda war.
The Russian president, a child of the KGB, has dusted down the disinformation playbooks of the cold war. He has added an expensive 21st-century gloss, harnessing 24-hour news, digital networks and social media to the Kremlin’s cause. Russia Today, the state-directed English-language news channel, is at once slick and untroubled by awkward concerns about accuracy and truth.
Given the state’s iron grip on the domestic media it is unsurprising that Mr Putin commands strong support at home. The stifling of internal dissent has seen him tap a powerful emotion – nationalism rooted in grievance. He is far from alone in seeing the collapse of the Soviet Union as a catastrophe and the US as the author of Russia’s subsequent ills. The foreigners are to blame.