Vladimir Putin is a liar, among other things. The KGB-operative-turned-Russian-autocrat runs the world’s most finely-tuned propaganda machine, replete with Kremlin-backed hackers, troll armies, and disinformation distributors. So you would think that he’d be able to fake some solid footage of Russian planes bombing ISIS terrorist targets for a sycophantic anti-American far-leftist filmmaker eager to gain access and cozy up to brutal dictators? Right?
Wrong. Footage shown to activist director Oliver Stone, a left-wing zealot even by Hollywood standards, during a recent trip to Moscow, purported to show Russian planes bombing ISIS; it turns out, however, that the video, shown via Putin’s iPhone, actually shows a U.S., yes, an American, U.S. AH-64 Apache laying waste to Taliban targets in Afghanistan. The footage is from a 2013 U.S. military operation designed to root out a a resurgent Taliban through the air with the assistance of Afghan soldiers on the ground.
The problem for Putin was that Russia doesn’t really bomb ISIS, no matter how much Kremlin spokespeople, Russian client states (see: genocidal Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad), and alt-right ethno-nationalists claim otherwise.
So what’s a poor boy like Vlad to do? Well why not show a gullible anti-American American dictator footage of American planes in action. To put it gently, Putin trolled Stone and Stone fell for it, which isn’t surprising given the fact that Stone eats up Russian propaganda with the ravenous appetite of a radicalized jihadi consuming extremist doctrines. This is the same director who made an entire movie about American traitor Edward Snowden based almost exclusively on interviews in Moscow overseen by the Kremlin minders.
Fortunately though, Putin’s lie caught the attention of Russian government watchdog groups.
The Russian leader’s lie was exposed by the Meduza Project, an organization of self-exiled Russian journalists based out of Riga, Latvia.
Watch below:
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
Now ain’t that some shit right there. https://t.co/hw8YHvWhc6
— Michael Weiss (@michaeldweiss) June 20, 2017