“So what—these Yankees, who shut their parliament when temperature drops to -15C, want to lecture us?! Dumbheads!!,” tweeted nationalist MP Ilya Drozdov, apparently referring to recent weather calamities on the East Coast. That was after he ripped off a few tweets mocking proposed new U.S. sanctions intended to punish Russia for the invasion. “Hooray!” he tweeted, hearing about the United States suspending military cooperation. “Hooray again!” he went on, hearing about the United States suspending trade talks with Russia. When word came of the Russian retaliation—the decision to re-introduce the ban on the U.S. pork—Drozdov wrote: “No entry for pigs from the USA.”

By invading Ukraine, MP Andrey Tumanov suggested in an interview with Sobesednik magazine, Russia is merely following America’s lead. “Russia should learn to be as shameless as the U.S. They live according to jungle laws. Anyone who is behaving decently and honestly they regard as a loser.”

Another MP, Vladimir Nikitin, waxed apocalyptic in an article on Ukraine for the regional website Pskovskaya Lenta. “The main battle of World War III is under way in Ukraine,” he writes. “The aggressor is Western civilization, which includes the U.S. and Europe.”