Via the New York Times:
As the United States condemned a referendum on the future of the Crimean peninsula staged by pro-Russian separatists on Sunday, one of Russia’s most influential television hosts appeared on the evening news in Moscow, before a huge mushroom cloud graphic, to remind viewers that Russia is still “the only country in the world capable of turning the U.S.A. into radioactive dust.”
Although the saber-rattling comments came from Dmitry Kiselyov, a news anchor well-known for his “mad as hell” delivery of diatribes on the supposed threats to Russia posed by foreign plotters andnative homosexuals, the report still stunned viewers of the state broadcaster’s main channel.
One reason is that, as the Russian journalist Leonid Ragozin observed, Mr. Kiselyov was the man recently chosen by President Vladimir Putin to lead an official news agency charged with explaining Kremlin policy to the world, a media organization to be called Rossiya Sevodnya, or Russia Today.
I’m not sure the term “sabre-rattling” is sufficient.
