Putin ally Margarita Simonyan posted an ominous message on Tuesday, making a nod to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962—a confrontation between the U.S. and then-Soviet Union that almost catapulted a full-scale nuclear war.
In a post shared to her Telegram channel, all Simonyan wrote was "Good evening, 1962."
Her remarks came just hours after Russia launched one of the broadest aerial strikes on Ukraine since the war began—an attack that reportedly included two missiles that spilled into neighboring Poland, killing two people in the NATO country. The attack also affected Moldova, which suffered a massive power outage after a key power line was knocked out by the strike.
Shortly after Tuesday's attack, Simonyan, who heads state-run media outlet RT, casted doubt as to whether the incident on the Polish side involved a missile from Russia, saying, "Before you accuse a country capable of erasing Poland into nuclear ashes, take the trouble to present evidence."
In her social media post, she insisted that there was a "much higher probability" that the warhead came from Ukraine, saying the chance that a "modern" Russian missile would go off course was "about the same as meeting a living dinosaur on the street."
According to her calculations, Simonyan said it was much more likely that the strikes in Poland were "either a Ukrainian mistake or a Polish provocation. Or British."
Tuesday's missile crossover into Poland marked the first time in the war that Russia's missiles allegedly launched into a NATO country, raising tremendous concern about how the incident may escalate the conflict and whether the war in Ukraine would officially become an international crisis.