Vladimir Putin’s propaganda chief, Dmitry Kisilev, the new head of Russian government-run and financed media/propaganda arm RIA Novosti, just talked about Russian turning the United States into “radioactive ash” today.

Kisilev made the comments on state television in front of an image of a huge mushroom cloud.

Just to further clarify how important Kisilev is, here’s Leonid Ragozin, a former employee of both the BBC and the Russian-language version of Newsweek:

Kiselev is not your average moron. He is Russia’s most senior government media executive, essentially minister of propaganda.

RIA Novosti was, surprisingly, an actually decent news outlet that regularly produced objective news. Clearly that does not stand in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and Putin fired the head of the organization and replaced him with Dmitri Kisilev, an exceedingly-fey anti-gay bigot who used to host one of Russia’s top news programs. Thus, he’s an unusual choice to be Russia’s new hetero-in-chief, running the government’s propaganda (and real) war against gays, among others.

Thanks to redditor SolidLiquid2, we now have the video:

Kisilev is famous for saying, on the air, last year that gay accident victims should have their hearts burned in order to guarantee no transplant victims receive their organs:

It was a few months after that remark that Russian President Putin appointed Kisilev to head RIA Novosti.

Here’s Kisilev today on Russian state TV:

For anyone who thinks that Russia is just like America, and that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is just like the war in Kosovo, or the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, you don’t the United States annexing Iraq, Afghanistan or Kosovo (or Kuwait, for that matter). And there’s a bit of a difference between stopping the expulsion of 1.5 Kosovar Muslims and annexing your neighbor because-you-can. In fact, Russia’s attitudes towards its neighbors mirrors Milosevic’s.

And while the Republicans lost the White House in 2008 in part because of Bush’s misadventure in Iraq, when is the last time a Russian leader lost an election?

And finally, you don’t hear incredibly vile, third-world-despot -type, threats of nuclear war coming out of the United States, and haven’t since Reagan’s bad joke of thirty years ago. But it’s not thirty years ago. It’s 2014. And Russia is for the second time in six years annexing a neighbor.

It would be nice if Russia’s leaders ever planned to bring that country into the modern world.

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