Vladimir Putin’s use of a video showing American planes to impress Oliver Stone of the power of Russian ones “is not simply a curiosity,” Igor Eidman says, but rather “a diagnosis” because “the entire Putin regime is a grandiose fake,” with fake news, statistics, sociology, politics, power, Parliament and a fake president at the top.
On his Facebook page, the Russian commentator, who works for Deutsche Welle, says that in Mr. Putin’s Russia “everything is a lie from top to bottom,” because officials constantly try to deceive and shift responsibility confident that only appearances matter and that no one will check (facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1525648010831506&id=100001589654713).
The Kremlin leader is trapped by this set of attitudes and arrangements, Mr. Eidman continues. Mr. Putin “tries to deceive his foreign partners, but his own subordinates crudely deceive him” at one and the same time because when he asks for something they deliver what they think he wants regardless of whether it is true.
This story illustrates that perfectly. President Putin wanted something to intimidate the Americans. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu passed his order on. Finally, it reached someone in the bowels of the bureaucracy who had to respond – and who passed back up the line what he felt he could get away with, in this case, a film of American planes that Mr. Putin could say were Russian.
As a result, Mr. Eidman says, “a perfectly Kafkaesque situation occurred: Mr. Putin in Mr. Stone’s film attempted to frighten the Americans with the power of their own military.” But in today’s information society, “everything secret sooner or later becomes known.” And that means the Putin regime, “which is based on lies, is condemned” as a result.