India, June 3 -- The comparison came not as a rhetorical flourish but as a deliberate charge. Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, used a sidelines interview at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on Wednesday to argue that the Ukrainian government has adopted the information playbook of the Islamic State terrorist organization - a claim that strips away the usual diplomatic hedging and puts Moscow's narrative framing of the conflict on unusually blunt display.

"The Kiev regime, by the way, as we have seen with ISIS, uses information extremely aggressively, the information field," Zakharova told TASS on the forum's opening day. "All the techniques are connected with the distortion of meanings." The ...