Paul Goble
Staunton, June 15 – The latest and perhaps bitterest ever Russian anecdote about Putin’s war in Ukraine runs as follows: a patient near death asks his doctor what’s wrong. The doctor says he needs a special operation. The patient asks if there isn’t any other way. And the doctor replies, unfortunately, euthanasia is officially banned in Russia.
That is just one of the anecdotes Moscow journalist Tatyana Pushkaryova has assembled in her latest collection (publizist.ru/blogs/107374/43181/-). Among the best of the rest are the following:
· The Kremlin’s most effective special operation is being carried out against the shelves in stores and the wallets of the poor.
· Russia has sworn enemies, countries where the population lives better than Russians do. And every year, despite everything, there are more and more of these enemies.
· The world has been awaiting Putin’s speech in St. Petersburg because he has achieved something no one else has – pushing his country’s economy down ten percent over the last year and successfully claiming that he has improved things.
· Kremlin propagandists visiting Mariupol have shed tears about homeless animals there. They have done so even as they fail to notice “the elephant in the room” – the piles of human beings that the Russian attack has left in its wake.
· Now that world leaders and international artists don’t come to the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, the Kremlin is desperate to find someone it can point to as being in attendance. One possibility are the frogs in local ponds who now can be presented as being at the center of the universe.
· Archaeologists in Omsk have discovered an ancient subway constructed about 100,000 years ago, and officials are jubilant. They plan to restore it next year and run decommissioned subway trains from Moscow on it.
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