Russian president Vladimir Putin and cinematographer Oliver Stone at the Kremlin in 2017. Putin shows Stone fake footage of a "Russian helicopter bombing ISIS," which in actuality was footage of U.S. forces fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2013 (Image: video capture)

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.

Footage of "Russian helicopter bombing ISIS" shown to Oliver Stone by Putin appears to be taken from 2013 US Afghan video.H/t @meduzaproject pic.twitter.com/qmWD1W6Tnw — CIT (en) (@CITeam_en) June 20, 2017

On his Facebook page, the Russian commentator, who works for Deutsche Welle, says that in 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.

The Kremlin leader is trapped by this set of attitudes and arrangements, Eidman continues. Putin “tries to deceive his foreign partners, but his own subordinate 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.

Putin showed Oliver Stone a video of Russians fighting in Syria. But it was actually U.S. forces in Afghanistan. https://t.co/zbKVZ4vG0T pic.twitter.com/wzU9U6LA2x — Meduza in English (@meduza_en) June 20, 2017

This story illustrates that perfectly. Putin wanted something to intimidate the Americans. Defense Minister Shoygu 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 Putin could say were Russian.

As a result, Eidman says, “a perfectly Kafkaesque situation occurred: Putin in 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 that Putin’s regime “which is based on lies is condemned” as a result.

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Tags: international, Oliver Stone, Putin, Putin regime, Russia, Russia's hybrid war, Russian disinformation