into journalism and PR textbooks.
Be sure to watch it — it’s worth your time.
A BBC journalist grills Peskov about yesterday’s report by the investigative team on the downed Boeing.
And our mustachioed billionaire is writhing like a snake in a frying pan. Four (!) times he is asked point-blank: do you accept or reject the commission’s conclusions?
Four times, neither “yes” nor “no.”
Saying “yes” is terrifying.
Saying “no” is impossible — the facts have pinned him to the wall too thoroughly.
It is disgusting and stupid: as I wrote two years ago, Russia is driving itself into a repeat of the “South Korean Boeing and the USSR in 1983” situation.
From the very beginning, it was clear to everyone: the Soviet military shot down the Boeing. It was also clear that there had been no intention to shoot down a passenger plane specifically — just a chain of fatal accidents, mistakes, and miscommunication.
They had almost done the only right thing — told it exactly as it was — but the urge to lie in every situation was too strong.
Here is how Igor Kirillov, the most famous Soviet TV presenter, tells the story:
And then it was off to the races. Watch it and compare it with today’s propaganda. Same playbook, same words, even the same people:
Did this lie make things better for the USSR?
No — it brought a new round of the Cold War, the “evil empire,” an intensified arms race at the cost of impoverishing ordinary people, which is what finished the USSR off.
Now it is the same thing all over again. A few military personnel made a tragic mistake and killed hundreds of innocent people. Instead of admitting it and paying compensation, lie is piled on top of lie: pilot Voloshin, the Spanish air traffic controller, the claim that the plane was already carrying corpses, a CIA operation, a Ukrainian MiG, and so on and so forth.
Five years from now, we will be reading memoirs just like Kirillov’s, with detailed accounts of who lied and how — have no doubt about it.
And it certainly will not be Peskov who pays for this; at worst, he may just stop sailing his yacht in the Mediterranean. The ones who will pay — through sanctions, falling living standards, and rising food prices — are ordinary citizens of the Russian Federation.
People