Bloomberg — Russian state television has no doubt who is unpredictable enough to bring the world to war in the North Korean crisis, and it’s not the reclusive communist dictator Kim Jong-Un.
According to Dmitry Kiselyov, the Kremlin’s top TV mouthpiece, the riskiest is Donald Trump, the man Russian officials and propagandists hailed just a few weeks ago as just the kind of leader the world needed.
In the latest sign of the Kremlin’s abrupt about-face on its erstwhile American hero, Kiselyov pronounced Trump “more dangerous” than his North Korean counterpart. “Trump is more impulsive and unpredictable than Kim Jong Un,” he told viewers of his prime-time Sunday “Vesti Nedelyi” program, which earlier this year carried paeans to Trump for his pledge to warm up relations with Russia.
Kiselyov and his colleagues on other channels also went after Trump’s family, noting that Kim hadn’t given his four-year-old daughter an office in his residence, in contrast to Trump’s appointment of his 35-year-old daughter, Ivanka, to a White House role.
‘Very Risky’
Russian officials aren’t so harsh in public. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov Monday urged the U.S. to avoid any unilateral use of force against North Korea, warning this would be “a very risky course of action” and comparing it to the U.S. missile strike earlier this month on Syria, which Moscow denounced as aggression. Lavrov spoke after U.S. Vice President Mike Pence said “the era of strategic patience is over,” while on a visit to the demilitarized zone between South and North Korea Monday.
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