Moscow is reeling from Ukraine’s bold counter-invasion of Russia, which caught many people off guard—including some of the Kremlin’s most prominent propagandists, whose lies are now blowing up in their faces. The blowback is so severe that even pundits whose unspoken job description includes the ability to lie with abandon are now calling on Russia’s mainstream media to start reporting “a bit more truth.”
During Monday’s broadcast of The Meeting Place on the NTV channel, Andrey Fedorov, a former Russian deputy foreign minister, didn’t mince his words, taking issue even with the deceptive title of the segment. He said: “For as long as we continue to live with headlines like ‘The Agony of the Regime,’ we will keep losing, because constant lies are coming from our side: about the weakness of the Ukrainian army and all that it’s lacking... Ukraine has approximately 20,000 men near the Belgorod region who can potentially participate.”
Host Andrey Norkin replied: “The most repugnant thing is that we overestimate our strength and underestimate the enemy. I think, this is very important, because people are certainly asking, ‘How could this have happened?’”