"Americans are accustomed to walking on scorched earth," Nikolai Patrushev, one of Russian President Vladimir Putin's most loyal and most powerful aides inside the Kremlin, said in a jarringly expansive interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta on Tuesday that touched on a variety of cultural and geopolitical grievances.

Using the kind of Soviet-era rhetoric that is more reminiscent of 1982 than 2022, Patrushev aimed his remarks not only at ordinary Russians but also, perhaps, to war dissenters in the West.

At other times, Patrushev seemed to borrow from the attacks that conservative Americans use against what they perceive as excesses in public education. (Russian media regularly amplifies the voices of Fox News host Tucker Carlson and other Biden administration critics seen as useful to the Kremlin's purposes; Ria Novosti, the state news agency, ran a column this week praising Rod Dreher of the American Conservative for predicting that what he described as "transgender madness" would lead to "the collapse of Western civilization.")

"Long ago, America divided the whole world into vassals and enemies," he asserted, giving voice to the embittered views of a Kremlin inner circle that finds itself besieged by war losses and international condemnation. "From childhood in the United States they have it hammered into their heads that America is a shining city on a hill, while the rest of humanity is just a proving ground for [military] experiments and resource extraction."

Patrushev predicted that Ukrainian dreams of unity would come to naught because "nationalist battalions" would sow division and lead Russia's neighbor to shatter "into several nations." Regions of eastern Ukraine, as well as the Crimean Peninsula, have been under Russian occupation since 2014, and the only real separatist movement that has threatened Ukrainian unity in recent years is the one backed by Moscow.