It took me a couple of times to believe this wasn't actually an attempt at humor (it may be still but the Post seems to be taking it somewhat seriously). Is this stuff playing well, and by that I mean making the government look better or more effective, in Russia itself? I realize a reader outside the US who was reading stories that show up in the gossip newspapers in supermarkets (my favorite the government's secret agreement with Aliens they met at Roswell NM) as if they were serious would have a pretty dim view of our government's sanity.
Russian government is focused on preserving the power right now - nothing else matters. Situation is far from stable - check Russian economic indicators, for example, or recent laws, say, against "foreign agents". For that reason a lot of newspapers, TV channels etc are forced to switch to propaganda, the source paper Izvestia is among them. This article is "for internal use" - meaning that is intended to show Russian readers how bad the West is.
