He has some beard, Mikhail Smolin. The deeply conservative and nationalist Russian historian has let the hair on his face grow so long and wild he looks like he is from the century before last.

His image is no doubt deliberate, studied: this is a man whose appearance is fashioned after 19th century novelists like Fyodr Dostoyevsky, Lev Tolstoy or maybe even the slightly more groomed Ivan Turgenev.

Last week Mr Smolin, speaking through his magnificent beard on Russian television, called for the Kremlin to train 10,000 to 15,000 Scottish “terrorists” in Siberia. His logic? That this would stop the British helping ready the Ukrainian military for its much-mooted spring counter-attack.

His remarks – as they were no doubt intended – generated some buzz, in Russia and in Scotland. Mr Smolin blurted them out on a propaganda talk show called the Meeting Place on a pro-Kremlin channel, NTV. They provoked an immediate rebuke from the programme’s co-host, Andrey Norkin.“Those are not our methods, Mikhail,” said the presenter.

The smackdown did not stop Mr Smolin’s patter getting picked up and translated on social media, providing a round of virtual gasping and guffawing.

There has long been a whole genre of viral social media clips of “mad things” said on Russian TV. And this has got bigger since Putin’s big invasion of Ukraine last year.

The Twitter and Facebook vids probably make state programming look more interesting than it actually is. But the excerpts do help a wider audience get to grips with Kremlin disinformation.

I suspect a lot of people in democracies like our own imagine authoritarian propaganda is a robot-like presenter reading out praise, North Korean style, for the state’s rulers. Nah-uh. Sometimes it is a blazing row between wackadoodles.

Mr Smolin’s job, whether he knows it or not, is to play the clown. Mr Norkin, the host, is the straight man; his role is often just to make his default Putinism look sane compared to the nonsense spouted by some of his guests.

The Daily Record – rightly – reported Mr Smolin’s jibber-jabber about Russia training Scottish terrorists as “bizarre”.

Scotland’s independence movement has its fair share of cranks, cretins and crazies. But the toughest most of them get is to boycott teacakes, egg a Labour MP or troll Nicola Sturgeon on Twitter as a “yoon spook”. These guys are toddler-like terrors, but they are not terrorists.

So why on Earth does Mr Smolin talk this kind of trash? He cannot possibly actually think there are thousands of Scots ready to take up arms and camp out in Siberia. This certainly is not something the Kremlin is considering. So what is his angle?

Well, this is Scotland once again being used as a propaganda talking point for domestic Russian audiences. Mr Smolin’s chat only makes sense if you see it as another way for Russian nationalists to dismiss the nationhood and the statehood of Ukraine.

The underlying idea here is that Ukraine belongs to Russia and Scotland to England. So if the English are going to meddle in Russia’s backyard, then Mr Smolin reckons Russia should do the same in England’s.

The Kremlin does not want to train Scottish volunteers that do not exist. But it does want to hosepipe its TV audience with the idea that Ukraine is as Russian as Scotland is British, that Moscow and London have their “spheres of influence”, that there is a natural imperial order to the world.

There are people here, even pro-indy types, who fall for this guff, Is Mr Smolin a fan of Scottish independence? Nope.

For me the historian is just one of the vaguely familiar talking heads who belch nonsense on endless propaganda shows on Russian television.

The old bearded fella is just 52. He was a teen when the Soviet Union collapsed and has become a champion of his country’s defunct monarchy, Orthodox faith and the far right’s culture wars in the West.

Mr Smolin is a founder of a conservative, national-chauvinist media outlet, Tsargrad, that is probably better known than he is. It is a surreal platform, not least about Scotland. Earlier this year it got particularly worked up about FM Humza Yousaf.

“Scotland has fallen,” it declared to its one million followers on Telegram. “Glasgow has been taken by a Pakistani.”

“In Britain there is a real fashion for politicians who do not have British roots,” Tsargrad continued before citing PM Rishi Sunak. “First the country got a prime minister of Indian origin and now a Pakistani has become head of the Scottish Nationalist Party.”

Yeah, yeah, I know: Mr Yousaf is not a Pakistani and the “N” in SNP does not stand for nationalist. But there is more: Tsargrad uses the UK’s current ethnic minority leaders (Anas Sarwar gets a name check too) as examples of what it sees as the inability of Europeans - it means white ones, doesn’t it? - to run their own affairs.

In the course of a single short article the outlet - repeating a well-worn anti-semitic trope - went from mocking Mr Yousaf to declaring that the Jewish Rothschild family would never let the French vote for far-right firebrand Marine Le Pen. In other words, the weirdie-beardie calling for Putin to train tartan terrorists on Russian TV comes straight from Euro-Fash central casting.

Russia’s authoritarian media eco-system throws up lots of low-credibility voices. So does our own, more pluralistic one.

Tsargrad is one of the outlets which likes to recycle some of Scotland’s disposable lolz-for-clicks commentary. For example, last year it bigged up claims in the Daily Express from an occasional pundit called Azeem Ibrahim that an independent Scotland could or would fall in to Russia’s orbit. Or maybe China’s.

“Britain is horrified by Putin’s strategic plan," went the Tsargrad headline.

This take is not really any more serious than Mr Smolin’s plan to prepare non-existent Scottish soldiers for a war of independence.

So, please remember, we do not just import Putin propaganda talking points; we export some too.