“It is not a war on Russian TV,” said Stanislav Kucher, a veteran Russian television host and former member of the presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights. Mr. Kucher moved to the United States after his shows were repeatedly shuttered.

“You will not see explosions, you will not see strikes on neighborhoods where civilians live, you will not see a lot in terms of troops, soldiers, heavy armored vehicles or anything like that,” he added…

Mr. Putin himself referred to the government in Kyiv as Nazis about 10 times during his meeting with the female flight staff last Saturday, and the word is repeated endlessly on every broadcast. To reinforce the idea, news channels frequently show black and white footage of actual Nazis.

News bulletins are fairly uniform from one television channel to the next. The “operations” in Ukraine are basically described as a peacekeeping mission by the military to rescue the Russian-speaking residents of the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk from the terrible war crimes perpetuated on them by the Ukrainian government. The West is described as completely unsympathetic to their plight.