Moscow in Confrontational Mode Reacting to Biden’s Inauguration Publication: Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 18 Issue: 11 (source: Wikimedia Commons) The Kremlin-controlled Russian media and top officialdom have greeted President Joe Biden and his administration taking power in the US with a massive, almost hysterical propaganda broadside. Kremlin news outlets have been castigating Biden as an old and senile figurehead president, who will hardly survive his four-year term and whose only purpose was to bring to power in Washington an extreme anti-Russian faction (Russian.rt.com, January 19). Other news outlets argue the situation is much worse: hopes that Biden would be an extremely weak president, opposed by a strong and consolidated GOP opposition led by Donald Trump, have been dashed by the unsuccessful January 6 assault on the US Capitol by a mob of badly organized militant Trump supporters. As a result, according to these news outlets, Trump left Washington an outcast, while the US elite is consolidating around Biden, who is emerging as a strong and dangerous enemy of President Vladimir Putin’s regime. The massive deployment of National Guard soldiers and other law enforcement in Washington during the Biden inauguration is interpreted as a powerful demonstration of force and resolve—something the Russians understand and can appreciate (Vzglyad, January 21).