My problem with British TV news isn’t that it’s woke and left-wing. One just considers the source and accepts the inevitable.
My problem is that our TV news has no entertainment value whatsoever. Why can’t our BBC commentators suggest that we kidnap a Russian minister, say Lavrov or Shoigu, then nuke Moscow and occupy the rest of the country?
Some of us would laugh, some would cry, but everyone would feel the frisson – no one would be bored. No such complaints about Russian state TV. Its news programmes beat Downton Abbey and Better Call Saul hands down.
For example, talk show hostess Olga Skabeyeva explained the other day that the “special military operation” in the Ukraine had ended, and “the Third World War has begun”.
She didn’t know about the West, but Russia had a clear-cut objective to pursue: “the demilitarisation of the whole North Atlantic alliance”. In war as in life, nothing beats setting realistic aims, rather than trying to gorge on an indigestible pie in the sky.
Miss Skabeyeva has done the job of the Russian General Staff by mapping out the war plan. She is prepared to send the Russian army on the mission to occupy 27 Nato members, including the US (there’s no other obvious way to demilitarise them all).
Those of us who have been admiring the performance of the Russian army in the Ukraine know that this objective is eminently achievable. But Duma Deputy (MP) Oleg Morozov demurred.
While approving of the overall strategy, he recommended a low-key start: kidnapping a Nato minister on a visit to the Ukraine.
“The plan is simple,” he said. “A Western defence minister goes to Kiev for talks with Zelensky, but ends up in Moscow. In Russia, that minister could be convicted for supplying arms to the Ukraine,” added Morozov, to a standing ovation from the studio audience.
Another commentator, Vladimir Solovyov, nicknamed ‘Putin’s voice’ has always been good value. But now he has added a few nice anti-British touches to his narrative.
Mr Solovyov focuses his displeasure with Britain on the trim figure of our megalomaniac Foreign Secretary, who seems to claim all the credit for the Ukraine’s defence. “Liz Truss says she is the one fighting this war”, he said.
If Liz doesn’t know that the Ukrainian army is also involved, we are all in trouble. Mr Solovyov explained what kind of trouble. The logical way to rein in our obstreperous Liz would be to invade the British Isles.
“Well, when we have to, then we will,” Solovyov promised confidently. “Where will we stop? Well, as I was saying today, maybe Stonehenge.”
My only hope is that the mighty Russian army will land at Dover or Folkestone and then take a southern route to Wiltshire, bypassing London or specifically Fulham, where I live.
However, Solovyov’s planned amphibious operation is good news for the denizens of Dorset, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, all of them lying to the west of Stonehenge, Russia’s strategic objective.
Yaakov Kedmi, the Moscow-born Israeli friend of Putin, favours dispensing with that version of D-Day landings. Rather than occupying Stonehenge, he thinks Russia should bomb Britain back to the period that historic site was built, between 3,000 and 2,000 BC.
Russia is a proud possessor of hypersonic Zircon missiles that are just the ticket for sending Britain on this journey to the past: “One, or one and a half launches from a multi-purpose submarine with Zircons will be enough. About 50 or 60 of Britain’s power stations will be gone in 10 minutes. And all of Britain will be back to the Stone Age… Within 10 minutes, nothing else is needed…”
Although I’m not quite sure what “one and a half launches” might be, I’m quaking in my Timberlands even as we speak.
Chairman of the Rodina (Motherland) party, Alexei Zhuravlyov, agreed in principle, but not in the choice of weapons. He’d rather use the MIRVed ICBM Sarmat: “One Sarmat and that’s it – the British Isles existed once, the British Isles don’t exist anymore. I’m serious,” he said.
Deadly serious, I daresay. But another guest on Skabeyeva’s show, her husband Yevgeny Popov, feared that there just might be a retaliatory strike: “But St Petersburg and Moscow would be wiped out within 90 seconds!”
Moreover, this sort of exchange might lead to a global nuclear war. As Skabeyeva’s poor husband put it, “No one will survive in this war when you propose the strike with a Sarmat. Do you understand that no one will survive? No one on the planet.”
Skabeyeva immediately dressed down her mutinous hubby-wubby. He worried too much, seeing problems where none existed. “We’ll start over, from scratch,” said Olga in a derisory way that suggested there would be no hanky-panky that night.
Mr Zhuravlyov felt that a puny little Britain was too insignificant a target for the mighty Sarmat: “I will competently tell you, that to destroy the entire East Coast of the US, two Sarmat missiles are necessary and two missiles for the West Coast. Four missiles, and there will be nothing left. They think… the mushroom cloud will be visible from Mexico.”
Alas, today’s lot aren’t a patch on Nikita Khrushchev in the cataclysmic threats department. Back in the early sixties, Nikita announced that the Soviets had developed a bomb that could wipe out the entire US with a single blast.
Now, 60 years and numerous technological advances later, it’s supposed to take as many as four bombs to wipe America out. I call that regression, not progress.
Mr Zhuravlyov’s immediate plans for the Ukraine are much more humane, practically vegetarian. He only wishes to annihilate five per cent of the Ukrainian population, magnanimously accepting that the rest aren’t really Nazis: “So the maximum five percent are incurable. Simply put, two million people which are ready to recreate the SS.”
Genocide, moi? Take it easy chaps, what’s a couple of million here or there among friends? As Stalin said, dismissing Eisenhower’s commiserations about Russia’s horrific war casualties, “We lost more during the collectivisation of agriculture”.
Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT, is philosophical about a nuclear holocaust. “It is what it is,” she said. “Personally, I think that the most realistic way is the way of World War III, based on knowing us and our leader, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin,” Simonyan added.
The upshot of it all is that you should investigate the possibility of receiving Russian programmes on your TV. Never a dull moment, take my word for it.
To my shame, I’ve never laughed so loud reading of one world annihilating scenario after another. Full credits to an excellent humorist in Mr Boot.
I have to assume that our intelligence agencies are aware of this. Or is it too obvious to just watch Russian television? Is it taken seriously? Seems not.
The Russian talks big and attempts to scare as a response to their own realization in so many ways they are weaker than they claim? Scare tactics with threats most ominous were a big thing during the Cold War. These grandiose killer weapons Vlad constantly talks about are just one example. Indeed, Russian rather muted military success in Ukraine sets off all the threats as an INSTINCTIVE response? “I must stand ten feet tall [three meters at least] and hiss at the Yankee or he will attack me.”