Russia obsesses over State Department spokeswoman

She is demonized on television. Her gaffes are celebrated widely as internet memes on Russian social media. A popular radio morning show even mocked her in a song set to a popular children’s tune.

“There is nobody more competent than Psaki, nobody more pretty, or smarter,” sang the chorus, sarcastically. The song accused her of peddling “nonsense” to journalists and urged her to “keep it up, we want to laugh more.”

Psaki’s statements are a regular feature of state-run media’s wall-to-wall coverage of Ukraine, which unfailingly slants towards the pro-Russian fighters in the country’s south-east.

RT, the Kremlin’s foreign language propaganda network, gleefully airs her missteps and posts them online with headlines like “State Dept Sideshow: Jen Psaki’s most embarrassing fails, most entertaining grillings” and “State Dept’s Jen Psaki grilled on Iraq, Ukraine – baffled by questions once again.”