Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.
Vladimir Solovyov’s program Full Contact ran a segment on Monday in which political commentator Dimitri Simes explained that Western leaders “keep living only for as long as we allow it,” and that Russia should stop pretending the West is a potential partner. Buried lede: Simes is a naturalized citizen of the United States.
He was born in Moscow in 1947 and emigrated to the US in 1973. Richard Nixon hired him as his informal Russia adviser. From 1994 until 2022, Simes ran the Center for the National Interest, a Washington foreign policy shop. In 2016, he advised Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and helped arrange the speech in which Trump made his case for a warmer relationship with Moscow.
The Justice Department indicted Simes and his wife Anastasia in September 2024 on charges of conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, actually violating it, and conspiracy to commit international money laundering. This is likely the reason he decided to move back to Russia. Russian TV Station Channel One pays him more than a million dollars, gives him a personal car and driver, a stipend for a Moscow apartment, and a team of ten employees.
So it comes as no surprise that Simes probably would be pro-Russia, seeing as how they provide him with literally everything and he also lives there. And if he set foot in the United States again, he would be arrested immediately. He’s biased, is what we’re trying to say.
The Vladimirs, seen here putting the ‘Vladimir’ in Vladimir. (Пресс-служба Президента/Wikimedia Commons)
Solovyov, for his part, warned Russians against harboring “illusions” about the war and said Russia can strike “any point, anywhere.” He did not name a point. He did not name an anywhere. He did not describe how Russia would be able to strike anything using its stockpile of 19th-century-grade military technology.
Russia, meanwhile, is currently having its ass handed to it by a much smaller country in a war it started over three years ago. It has lost more men, material, and tanks in total than it had on hand at the start of the war. Ukraine’s attacks on Russia’s infrastructure have spiked domestic demand for horses and donkeys for use as transport. It’s unclear if Russia even has working nuclear weapons. This won’t prevent them from making continued threats in the future, but all of these facts will allow us to continue to ignore them entirely.
This story is based on fully factual news, but if we got it wrong, blame these guys, we’re just here to make it funny.
