(MOSCOW) – A prominent Russian state media host and his weatherman have called for the targeted assassination of Ukrainian leaders and Western business figures, while also demanding an escalation of missile strikes against European military infrastructure.
During a recent broadcast of the radio show “Full Contact,” host Vladimir Solovyov and weather forecaster Evgeny Tishkovets presented a unified narrative that framed Russia’s war on Ukraine as an inevitable historical clash with the West. Solovyov described the full scale invasion as unavoidable, arguing that the collapse of empires always leads to wars between their constituent parts.
“We were dragged into this war for a very long time, and I believe it was inevitable,” Solovyov said. He asserted that Russia, which he termed a “breathing empire,” is undergoing a process of reassembling its lost territories, a process he claimed was proven by the annexation of Crimea.
Solovyov wove together multiple historical threads to justify the ongoing aggression. He invoked the dissolution of the Russian Empire in 1917, claiming Russia began to reassemble itself regardless of the will of the Bolshevik leaders, whom he said were not patriots but proponents of a proletarian dictatorship that viewed the nation state as heresy. The second historical line, according to the host, is a centuries old Western ambition for eastward expansion. He described Europe as a small, overpopulated space on the Eurasian continent that is “sandwiched between expanses of water” and possesses a passionate desire to spread outwards, inevitably colliding with Russia.
Moving to contemporary threats, Solovyov addressed recent reports of fuel shortages and restrictions in various Russian regions. He criticised the dismissive attitude of private companies who, a year ago, reportedly told government officials that paying taxes was sufficient and refused to cooperate on unspecified problems.
The host then issued a direct call for a campaign of extrajudicial killings. Citing unverified information that specific Chinese companies are supplying goods to Ukraine through Spanish and Hungarian intermediaries, Solovyov declared, “We need to identify the leadership and eliminate the leadership of the companies that do this.” He further demanded, “We need to eliminate the terrorist leadership of the terrorist state of Ukraine.”
Solovyov also referenced an individual he named as Fyodorov Shteleman, who conducted a protest action involving a laser targeting device at the Russian embassy in Paris, and called for the same approach: “Let’s eliminate them.” He expressed confidence that there are people in the country capable of solving this task anywhere in the world, claiming this has always been the domain of the special services of both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.
The host then challenged the logic of informing the Russian public about Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory. He questioned the need to reveal precisely what was hit and the extent of the damage, asking, “What is the goal, to inform the people so that the people what?” Solovyov argued that such transparency would drive the populace to hysteria, invoking the early months of the Second World War as a comparison. “If they started telling them everything, they would have gone crazy. By September, the country would definitely not exist,” he said, questioning the very origin of the phrase “the people’s right to information.”
Immediately following this monologue, weatherman Evgeny Tishkovets linked his meteorological analysis directly to the execution of military strikes. While clarifying that weather does not affect the force of a nuclear blast itself, Tishkovets stated it is the key factor determining its consequences.
He explained that wind, precipitation, and atmospheric stability can alter the level of radioactive contamination by tens or even hundreds of times at various distances from the epicentre. The presence of rain during a blast could increase contamination by one to three orders of magnitude, while wind speed can change the radiation dose rate on the ground by up to 200 percent.
Tishkovets concluded that an accurate weather forecast is critically important for assessing the consequences of a strike on military targets in Europe “where they forge weapons against us and send this to Ukraine.” He demanded an escalation, stating, “We must end this and carry out strikes and escalate. We must set the rules of the game and make it so that our enemies, the fascists in Europe, find it dangerous and painful to walk this earth.”
The broadcast was shared by the Russian Media Monitor project, which tracks propaganda on Russian state television.