Why everyone is wrong about Russia’s next target

General Pyotr Gregori Pompkin surveyed the smouldering wasteland before him.

“It is good.”

As the starving air curled in Faustian circles around the general, he remembered the brazen lie that Russia had deployed as a reason to invade their peaceful neighbour, to set about exterminating their population and stealing their land. He chuckled. His toes curled pleasurably in the ashes.

2,030 Russians dead and wounded in one day on the 29th November, 1,740 on the 30th November, 1,730 on the 1st of December, three quarters of a million Russians gone so far and the daily number was accelerating. He wiped his eye with pride that Russia had achieved three times as many of its own dead as that of the Ukrainians.

As the hair gently burned off his neck, Pompkin went through his winning calculus again. 20,000 children abducted by Russia, the President and the Minister for Children wanted by the International Court of Justice for genocide, 72 percent of Russian missiles and drones fired deliberately at civilian targets, 12,000 civilians murdered, 622 children under the age of 5 murdered, 1,600 Ukrainian prisoners of war taken into custody and then shot, 95 percent of prisoners tortured, endless rapes of women, men and children, 465 uses of chemical weapons, an IRBM fired against a densely populated civilian city, 39,347 international war crimes uncovered so far, Russian politicians and the Russian armed forces had now committed every single one of the same atrocities committed by the Nazis. They were now identical in God’s eyes — and he saw that it was excellent.

The demon drink sidled up alongside the Russian general.

“My old friend! Throughout my career we were never separated. It is good to see you again, in this place of damnation.”

The vodka bottle tilted slightly in the eternal glow and asked “Pyotr, why do you keep smiling?”

Pompkin gazed into the expanse of embers and, from the depths of his own enigma, replied “Some people play board games every evening. It is not for me. I don’t think it summons anything. Between you and me, my glassy friend, it doesn’t matter what other people do in their own houses.”

“So why Ukraine?”, the spirit asked him.

“Ukraine was never the objective of the Special Military Operation. There are now so many Russians in Hell, we will soon have a majority to annex it.”