From WNYC in New York, this is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield. There is at the moment no shooting war in Ukraine. Russia's annexation of Crimea has till now been accomplished with negligible resistance.

There is, however, a full-blown propaganda war in progress, waged by the Kremlin with eerily familiar weapons of mass deception.

Big lies.

Putin claimed Ukrainians are living in terror.

And staged incidents.

Among the pro-Russian protests in Ukraine, growing evidence of protest tourists.

All playing to what for Russians is a resonant historical truth.

In an emotional speech, Putin said Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula has always been an integral part

of Russia in the hearts and minds of people.

While Western audiences may dismiss Vladimir Putin's fabrications as transparent and even primitive,

the majority of Russians have embraced Russia's annexation of Crimea as a historic rescue mission.

Michael Idaf, editor-in-chief of GQ Russia, says the blunt propaganda tactics are intended to bolster one master narrative that's been building for years.

It's basically Russia as a besieged fortress, beset on all sides by enemies.

Once you've established that, all you need to prove is that the people who came to

power in Ukraine are fascists, and fascist is the scariest of the scary words for the Russian psyche,

which is still heavily scarred by World War II. And then that immediately becomes a pretext for

liberating the crime units from the terrible fascist regime established in

Kiev. I sound like I'm exaggerating, but I'm not. I'm reading an official statement by the Russian

foreign ministry, but calls what happened in Kiev a Nazi coup. Now, here in the West, we have

seen, reported, no evidence of violence against ethnic

Russians or any kind of the siege that the Kremlin is describing. Have any such episodes

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