The "information war" against Russia makes any efforts to improve the country's image in the West futile, a Kremlin spokesman said Thursday after the U.S. public relations firm Ketchum said its contract with the Russian government had ended.

After years spent exhorting the virtues of soft power, Western diplomats must be watching House of Cards with gloom.

The anti-Americanism makes it harder for American culture to make inroads through its traditional means — soft-power routes such as movies, music and education.

The masked gunmen seen in Crimea, Donetsk and Lugansk came only after the population had been conditioned, through propaganda and other soft power tools, to see Mr. Putin’s Russia as a saviour from the government under which they’d been living.

Since becoming president, Barack Obama has emphasized soft power, suggesting that an over-reliance on military force has alienated many of the United States’ friends and allies without achieving much in return. But many Republicans, and even some Democrats, accuse him of overcorrecting (...). For all their finger-pointing, both parties have, in reality, come to embrace an intermediary approach—what can best be called “energy power.”

Last June, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon issued a far-reaching administrative ruling that offered marital benefits for the first time to all of the United Nations’ lesbian and gay employees, as well as to other U.N. workers who had entered legally recognized domestic partnerships. On Monday, March 2, Russia gave the plan a resounding nyet.