Meanwhile, Victoria Nuland has also been taking issue with some of the things being said in Russia about the Ukraine crisis:
The United States' top diplomat for Europe has denounced "lies" by Russian state media about the Ukraine conflict.
Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland said on January 27 that the signatories to September's Minsk agreement aimed at ending the fighting should be held to account "when state-owned Russian media spews lies about who is responsible for the violence."
She added that some claims by the Russian government on state media "are so outlandish" that the Russian people "are no longer believing them."
Her remarks at the Brookings Institution in Washington came as violence in eastern Ukraine has escalated in recent days with pro-Russian separatists launching an assault on the port city of Mariupol.
Nuland also said the United States would consider an additional $1 billion in loan guarantees to Kyiv if Ukraine "stays the reform course."
RFE/RL's resident Kremlin watcher, Brian Whitmore, has been looking at what may be behind Vladimir Putin's remarks yesterday, when he said a NATO "foreign legion" was fighting for Kyiv in Ukraine. His analysis is not for the fainthearted:
You can learn a lot about someone from their delusions.
Consider Vladimir Putin's comments on January 26. Speaking to students at St. Petersburg, the Kremlin leader said the Ukrainian Army is not really the Ukrainian Army at all. Those soldiers fighting pro-Moscow separatists in Donbas? They're actually NATO's foreign legion.
"We often say: Ukrainian army this, the Ukrainian army that. In actual fact though, who is fighting there? These are indeed official subunits of the armed forces. But to a large extent these are so-called volunteer nationalist battalions," Putin said.
"In effect, it is no longer an army but a foreign legion -- in this case NATO's foreign legion -- which does not of course pursue Ukraine's national interests. They have a completely different agenda that is connected with achieving the geopolitical objective of containing Russia."
Yep. He actually said that.
Putin is doing a number of things here. On one level he is playing that old Kremlin game of drawing equivalencies.
The West has long accused Moscow of manufacturing the separatist conflict in the Donbas, arming and supplying the militants, and sending in Russian troops to direct and reinforce them.
So Moscow naturally -- indeed almost instinctively -- says the West is doing the same with the Ukrainians: Look! NATO has little green men too!
But there is more here than the Kremlin's standard run-of-the-mill -- and entirely false -- whataboutism. It is more insidious than that.
Read the entire Power Vertical blogpost here
Another update from our news desk:
The Ukrainian Interior Ministry has added a prominent Russian actor to a wanted list for firing a machine gun towards Ukrainian armed forces in eastern Ukraine in October.
The ministry's website said on January 27 that Mikhail Porechenkov is suspected of terrorism or a threat to implement a terrorist act and is avoiding Ukrainian investigators.
The ministry said an arrest warrant has been issued for Porechenkov.
In October, Porechenkov was filmed standing with pro-Russian separatists and firing a machine gun near the Donetsk airport while wearing patches that identified him as a member of the press.
On October 31, the Ukrainian Interior Ministry filed criminal charges against Porechenkov after the footage went viral on the Internet.
Porechenkov said it was a staged scene, that he was firing blanks, and that the only bullet-resistant vest and helmet he could find were labelled "press."
(UNIAN, Interfax)