8 March 2018

Al Jazeera: How Putin failed to scare the world

The address almost sounded like one that a North Korea leader would deliver. After a short introduction about economic and social problems, Putin went on to talk at length about Russia's new nuclear weapons, which supposedly have no equivalent elsewhere in the world and which give the country an advantage over the US. Behind his back a big screen showed a video of advanced rockets targeting what looked like the US state of Florida.

In terms of pathos, Putin's weapons presentation matched that of Apple unveiling iPhoneX, but the quality of the graphics dragged it down. Russia Today Managing Editor Margarita Simonyan said that the people who created the video "did not really study design but how to effectively blow themselves up [and the enemy] with a grenade." [...]

Putin, of course, would love it if the world saw Russia as the Soviet Union during the Cold War, as one of two, or as one of three (if one counts China) superpowers. But the presentation of threatening-looking nuclear missiles did not produce the desired result. In fact, after Putin's speech, Russia started looking more like another North Korea - a weak country whose only trump card is nuclear weaponry. [...]

Apart from that, Putin showed a video of a new intercontinental missile called "Samrat" (that same one in which Florida seemed to be targeted). But it turned out that this video first aired in 2007 in a documentary on Russia's First Channel to illustrate another missile called "Voevoda" the technology for which was developed in the 1970s.

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