A colossal military drill supervised by President Vladimir Putin has sent Western commentators scrambling to their underground bunkers. But as the fiery footage is beamed around the globe, US & UK rocket tests have gone unnoticed.
Britain’s Daily Mail reported on Thursday that Moscow was “practising for nuclear war,” while the Daily Express told its readers that Russian “sabre-rattling risked reigniting World War 3 fears as global tensions remain high.”
However, some observers took to the internet to point out that they must have missed the reports of imminent annihilation in response to similar Western exercises, such as when the UK launched a Trident D5 missile in 2016.
Similarly, US-led rocket tests on the Black Sea, which prompted a Crimean politician to warn of a potential NATO-backed invasion, were scarcely covered outside Russia.
On Friday, it emerged that the US Navy had fired a new Tomahawk ballistic missile, the first of its kind, from the USS Chafee in the Pacific Ocean.
Yet the incident attracted little attention, and even less concern, from mainstream news organizations.
In November, tensions between Russia and the West were driven to new highs as the General Secretary of NATO used a press conference to urge members of the bloc to send more warships to the Black Sea. Jens Stoltenberg’s office then issued a report claiming that Russia frequently orders “intimidatory military operations in the immediate vicinity of NATO.”
