On the evening of February 23, a little more than a day after Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych fled Kiev in the middle of the night, ceding power to protesters on the Maidan, Dmitry Kiselev was in an especially apocalyptic mood. Kiselev is host of “Vesti Nedeli,” or “News of the Week,” which airs on Rossiya, a state-owned channel that reaches 90 percent of Russian households. Every Sunday for two hours, he holds forth on his many bugbears, phobias, and hatreds: the degenerate West, traitorous liberals at home. In recent months, the show had developed a near single-minded fixation on Ukraine—or as, Kiselev saw it, the fascist usurpers that had seized power in Kiev and were being propped up by the NATO machine. On this particular night, he declared that the ouster of the Putin-aligned Yanukovych government represented nothing less than the “end of statehood” for Ukraine. The country was now under “external control,” he said, by which he meant the shadowy forces of the West. “With the starry blue flags of the European Union, made smoky from the fumes of burning tires, the country was plunged into a condition in which human life is only worth a kopek.”

Since the Maidan protests, and especially after the fall of Yanukovych, Russian television has been engaged in a propaganda onslaught unprecedented in the post-Soviet era, implying or inventing dark suspicions about Western motives in Ukraine while painting Russia’s own meddling as a heroic answer to the call of justice. Kiselev is the most high-profile, not to mention theatrically gifted, character in this on-air drama. At 60, he has a round, soft face, thin white hair cut short to the scalp, and a smile that is at once cherubic and menacing. His delivery is dynamic and highly mannered—he paces across the set and punctuates his points with the hand gestures of an overeager mime. He might make his fingers dance in the air or glide his hand across his body, while accusing pro-European protesters in Kiev of launching a “war against Russia,” or declaring the violent clashes between protesters and police last December to be a “co-production” ordered and paid for by the U.S. State Department. At times, his speech can have an almost lyrical quality, even when its content is quite ominous, such as the night he stood in front of a large photo of a mushroom cloud and reminded viewers that Russia is still “the only country in the world capable of turning the USA into radioactive dust.”

It is programs like Kiselev’s that help explain why, according to polling by the independent Levada Center, 67 percent of Russians say the new government in Kiev is not legitimate, and 85 percent consider the collapse of the Yanukovych regime a coup. Ninety-two percent of respondents told the Levada Center that television was their main source of information about events in Ukraine.

Outside Russia, Kiselev is perhaps most famous for his pronouncement that gays and lesbians “should be prohibited from donating blood, sperm, and, in the case of a road accident, their hearts should be either buried or cremated as unsuitable for the prolongation of life.” He made the remark in April 2012 to a studio audience—who clapped approvingly—but the segment did not receive widespread attention until a year later, after Russia passed a law banning “gay propaganda” in the presence of minors. Since then, Kiselev has spent a lot of time trying to explain himself. It was a “controlled flame that I used to ignite the discussion,” he told one interviewer. The problem with homosexuals, Kiselev told another, “is that they carry themselves provocatively . . . deliberately encouraging and provoking a situation so they become victims.” Still, Kiselev can’t stay away from making gay jokes, if that’s the right word for them: In February, he suggested that the Iwo Jima monument looked like men having sex. “A fevered subconscious could ascribe just about anything to it,” he said, his lips curling into a self-satisfied grin. “Take a closer look: a very modern theme, isn’t it?”

Kiselev’s true target is not the millions of viewers who watch the Rossiya channel—though his ratings are strong, he does not win his time slot—but the handful of people in the Kremlin who set the accepted tone for the country’s political culture. He praises Vladimir Putin extravagantly on air. On the occasion of the president’s sixtieth birthday in October 2012, Kiselev delivered a twelve-minute panegyric that concluded, “In terms of the scale of activity, Putin as a politician is comparable among his predecessors in the twentieth century only to Stalin.” Above all, his show is a portal into the darkest, most conspiratorial urges of the current iteration of Putinism. For years, Putin did not make any ideological claims to legitimacy. Instead, he based his power on Russia’s improving fortunes and rising standard of living. But since his return to the presidency in 2012, he has tried to assemble a new justification for his rule, based on an amalgamation of conservative values, Russian exceptionalism, and a sense that the country is under threat from the malicious encroachments of the West. The crisis in Ukraine, which Putin sees as a proxy struggle between Russia and the West, has only intensified these impulses, and Kiselev presents this worldview at its most uncompromising.