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“Vladi, they’re killing our soldiers by the thousands. Morale is as low as it can possibly be. Men are deserting, and the ones who are staying behind are too dumb to be trained. This can’t go on. Either we escalate in a big way or we quit.”
“Comrade, if I hear you speak the word “quit” again, I’m sending you to the front lines with those losers. We don’t quit and we don’t lose. We are all in for the glory of mother Russia.”
“But Vladi, there’s no end in sight. One day we get a foothold in some God-forsaken village at the cost of 500 men and the next day we give it back, leaving behind corpses and equipment. You know as well as I, we went in with the idea of a quick victory, and we can’t go on like this forever.”
“Then we have to escalate. Up the power of the weapons, up the number of attacks. It’s all in, all in I tell you, no matter what anyone says.”
“But Vladi, even we need an excuse, even we need some good public relations if we choose to escalate. Can we conjure up a justification? Can we offer the world a reason why we are doing this?”
“We have lots of reasons. We’re doing this because those terrible Ukrainians are engaging in war crimes. They are targeting and killing civilians. Hospitals. Churches. Women and children. They’re executing prisoners. That’s our reason”
“But Vladi, that’s us, not them—and everybody knows it. Saying that can’t help but emphasize the atrocities we are guilty of.”
“Okay, okay… Aha, I’ve got it. We are going to punish those damned Ukrainians for the most foul of plots. Those bastards tried to assassinate me.”
“But Vladi, they didn’t. They’re not planning anything of the sort. Are you just making this up out of thin air?
“Schmuck, of course I am. But that’s why I’m running the show and you never got further than colonel. I’ll be far out of town, but we’ll tell the world that two Ukrainian drones attacked the Kremlin in an attempt to kill me. We’ll even go so far as to set fire to a junk-laden store room in the back of the Kremlin to show their attack. And, by the way, make sure we have lots of flammable stuff in there so the world can watch—they love watching explosions and fires—and make sure the firemen are out of sight, but ready to douse it all once the cameras are off.”
“ But Vladi, nobody would be stupid enough to believe that two Ukrainian drones could make it all the way to the Kremlin without our forces detecting and destroying them. Nobody would be stupid enough to believe that the Ukrainians would target you in the Kremlin when the most rudimentary intelligence would tell them that you were far out of town. Nobody could be so idiotic as to fall for something like that.”
Just wait and see,” sayeth the Prime Minister with his typical sinister smirk. “Just wait and see.”
