“Sanctions? Don’t make my Iskander laugh.”

Russia’s anti-American fever goes beyond the Soviet era’s

Anti-American measures quickly suffused the nation, ranging from the symbolic to the truly significant. Some coffee shops in Crimea stopped serving Americanos. Activists projected racially charged images of Obama eating a banana onto the side of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Russians cheerfully flocked to exchange Western-branded clothing for ­T-shirts with pictures of an Iskander missile launcher that said “Sanctions? Don’t make my Iskander laugh.”

“This anti-Western propaganda radically changed the atmosphere in the society,” said Lev Gudkov, the director of the Levada Center, the opinion polling firm. “It has become militarist.”

HT:LR