WATCH: This OAN Propaganda ‘Report’ Claims Russia Has Peaceful Intent to Rescue ‘Ukraine Regime’ from Nazis

Watch out, Tucker Carlson. There’s competition for your role as the Kremlin’s favorite American media figure.

Your friendly neighborhood Mediaite contributing editor was going to write that this clip from too-nutty-for-DirecTV OAN really just has to be seen to be believed, but we’ve seen it, and we’re still not sure we believe it’s a real broadcast from an alleged news program and not some sort of elaborate prank or Saturday Night Live-ripoff.

“Russia is now preparing for the fourth round of talks with the Ukrainian regime,” says the female anchor to kick off a segment where every single sentence contains a misrepresentation, distortion, or outright lie.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was democratically elected in 2019, in contrast to Russian “President” Vladimir Putin, who first held that office from 2000 to 2008 and again starting in 2012, with a stint as prime minister in between, and “elections” that were neither free nor transparent scattered throughout.

“Russian’s foreign ministry says the new round of peace talks with Ukraine will begin in Belarus Monday,” the anchor continues. “Moscow reiterated its peace proposals, saying Ukraine must demilitarize and accept non-aligned status in global affairs.”

To be clear, Russia picked this fight. They invaded a sovereign country with a democratically-elected government. Their “peace proposals” would subjugate Ukraine into a puppet state under Moscow’s control.

“Over the past two weeks, Russian forces established control over 89 cities in eastern and southern Ukraine, and neutralized 90 percent of Ukraine’s military infrastructure.”

This is a wildly optimistic and exaggerated assessment of Russia’s efforts to control Ukraine, which thus far have been stymied by the Ukrainian “Rasputitsa” muddy season, poor equipment maintenance, a delusional belief that Ukrainians would immediately surrender, and across-the-board logistical failures as Russia struggles to feed and supply their own troops. Zelensky himself has credited Russian troops for abandoning so much equipment that they count as a major supplier for the Ukrainian military.

Here’s where the OAN report really goes off the rails. “New reports appear to support Russia’s concerns about extremist groups working with the Ukrainian government,” says the anchor before cueing up a video segment with Scott Ritter, who the chyron identifies as a former intelligence officer with the U.S. Marines.

According to the (Albany, New York) Times Union, Ritter is a convicted sex offender who was paroled from a Pennsylvania state prison in 2014 with conditions of his parole including prohibitions on possessing weapons, consuming alcohol, and contact with anyone younger than 18 years old without approval from parole officials. Ritter was also required to submit to drug testing and outpatient sex offender treatment.

“These guys came in and took over Maidan, violently overthrew the legitimate president of Ukraine, and then imposed themselves through force of violence into Ukrainian body politic,” claims Ritter.

Ritter is grossly misrepresenting the 2014 Maidan Revolution, in which Ukrainians protested then-President Viktor Yanukovych’s rejection of an agreement with the European Union that the Ukrainian Parliament had approved. Yanukovych was viewed as a Russian puppet and rejected the alliance with the EU to forge closer ties with Russia.

Yanukovych is still alive and breathing; the Ukrainians didn’t seek to kill him (in contrast to the repeated attempts to assassinate Zelensky). Instead, the parliament voted to remove him from office in 2015 and he was sentenced in absentia to thirteen years’ imprisonment for high treason and mass killing of civilians by a Ukrainian court.

Ritter then went on to claim that American, British, and Canadian forces that were training Ukrainian forces in “NATO tactics,” were actually training the Azov battalion. “We trained Nazis!” Ritter exclaims.

Here we have a favorite tactic of propagandists: take a tiny kernel of truth and wrap it in a hundred layers of lies. There is in fact an “Azov Battalion” within the Ukrainian national guard who have accurately been criticized as having neo-Nazi sympathizers among their ranks and adopting symbology and slogans similar to the Nazis.

However, as NBC News pointed out, “there is no evidence to suggest widespread support for such extreme-right nationalism in the government, military or electorate.” In Ukraine’s most recent elections in 2019, not one single candidate from a coalition of right-wing extreme nationalist parties was able to win a parliamentary seat. Moreover, Zelensky is Jewish and he ran for office on a platform of centrist politics and corruption reform, not any extremist nationalist or right-wing positions.

“Russia says Kyiv must expel extremist groups from its military and allow the Russian language to be spoken freely in Ukraine,” the anchor concludes, wrapping up the just over one-minute segment with another pile of hot steaming misinformation.

The Russian language has always been spoken freely in Ukraine. Like many Ukrainians, Zelensky himself grew up speaking Russian as his first language and only mastered Ukrainian when he decided to get into politics.

Pinch your nose and watch the video above, via OAN.

(h/t Bobby Lewis)

This post has been updated with additional information.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.