POTEMKIN MISSILE: Russia Tried to Con the World With Bogus Missile. “The Russians hyped a cruise missile launch earlier this year. But a briefing by the CIA and a second agency determined that it was essentially a hoax.”

The alleged Russian misdirection came just days before the United States announced that it would withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty—the treaty that Russia violated, in the U.S. view.

Almost nothing Russia showed off to support its claims at that press conference had anything to do with the missile the U.S. is most interested in, according to an assessment briefing put together by the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.

Earlier this month, those two U.S. intelligence agencies determined that the cruise missile canisters and launch vehicle the Russian Ministry of Defense publicly showed at the briefing were not related to the missile that the United States has argued since 2014 violates the 1987 treaty, The Daily Beast has learned.

Helmut Kohl and Margaret Thatcher stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Ronald Reagan on putting Pershing II intermediate-range missiles into Europe — a move which forced the Soviets to agree to the INF treaty getting rid of everyone’s IRBMs. It’s difficult imagining Western Europe’s current leadership doing anything of the sort.