My friend Vlad is working hard to make sure I never run out of subjects. At a time when Dave has gone quiet, Vlad manfully steps in to fill the gap.
Actually, neither Dave nor any other Western politician possesses the epic élan with which Vlad so generously provides material for my vituperation.
For example, I can’t for the life of me imagine the somewhat wimpish Dave donning full ice-hockey gear and scoring eight goals in an exhibition match against Canadian professionals who have just won the World Championship in Sochi.
Yet Vlad has done just that, and at the venerable age of 62. Not just a judo master, tiger tamer, long-distance swimmer, hunter, lawyer, intrepid KGB spy, musician, national leader, bare-torso horse rider – a hockey star too. Verily I say unto you, Vlad’s picture ought to be in the dictionary next to the entry for ‘Renaissance man’.
Or rather pre-Renaissance, according to his admirers who have just unveiled near St Petersburg a bust of Vlad as a Roman emperor. Vlad is depicted wearing a toga adorned with Russia’s escutcheon.
The style is neo-Classicist, favoured by Vlad’s role model Stalin. The facial expression is dreamily stern, making Vlad look like a cross between Caligula and Nero, surely not the desired effect. He should have been sculpted to look more like Caesar, whose martial exploits he is clearly out to emulate.
Whichever emperor Vlad sees as his pre-Stalin role model, one wonders how long before the Russians march around the bust, chanting “Ave Vlad, morituri te salutant”.
And speaking of morituri, Vlad suffered a minor setback the other day though, when two Spetsnaz commandos, Cap. Yerofeeyev and Sgt. Alexandrov, were captured behind enemy lines, meaning deep in the Ukrainian territory.
When interrogated, they revealed the details of their search-and-destroy mission, providing yet again incontrovertible proof that it’s the Russian regular army that’s raping the Ukraine, not some mythical local enthusiasts acquiring tanks and AA missiles at local hardware shops.
Vlad’s Defence Ministry hastily claimed that the two commandos weren’t on active service. Well, the service didn’t look passive to me, considering that the two gentlemen carried current army ID, their mission was terrorist, and they shot several Ukrainian officers when being taken. If I were them, I’d be rather upset by being disowned in such a dismissive manner by the government they serve so bravely.
That takes us from Luhansk, Ukraine to Weybridge, Surrey, where a young and healthy Russian oligarch Alexander Perepelichny collapsed and died while jogging in 2012. Perepelichny’s heart had been no doubt weakened by his grassing up the Russian participants in the Magnitsky case, and also in the newly traditional Russian pastime of money laundering.
(For details, see my article posted at the time http://alexanderboot.com/content/surrey-jogger-could-run-he-couldn%E2%80%99t-hide.)
Anticipating the onset of heart trouble, Mr Perepelychny had taken out a multi-million life insurance policy, with the attendant medical examination missing the fatal cardiac defect. At the same time he had reported multiple death threats, which must have contributed to his ill health.
Death by natural causes, ruled Surrey police at the time. However, the newly released results of the chemical analysis show that the grass died by, well, grass. I suppose this does qualify as a natural death in that it was caused by a naturally occurring substance.
The culpable plant is called gelsemium, which has several varieties, all highly toxic, all found only in the remote areas of China. In the spirit of the burgeoning Sino-Soviet alliance, the Chinese kindly make their native flora available to Russia’s emergent industry, contract killing.
Vlad evidently has a taste for exotic methods of chastising those whose loyalty he has reason to doubt. Polonium and gelsemium are so much more elegant than a bullet in a dark alley, and, on a more practical note, so much harder to detect.
Yet one has to admit regretfully that Vlad still hasn’t quite matched the fecund imagination of his North Korean counterpart, who dispatches his enemies either by ripping them to shreds with AA machineguns or by using wild beasts for that purpose.
Vlad has no shortage of either, and in fact he has been photographed on numerous occasions bear-back [sic] riding and whispering into a tiger’s ear. A suspicion grows that he was briefing the animal on a mission designed to show that anything Kim can do, Vlad can do better.