The pains of the day gather in the night. The keeper of the seals sits alone. With exhaustion. With the mirror. With history. “Victory Day,” celebrations of Nazism’s defeat, were underwhelming. The attendance of foreign signatures was not befitting of Russia. He did not feel the powerful’s exhilaration nor the awe of the celebrations. He struggled to hide his disappointment. How he longed to announce an overwhelming victory over Ukraine that day. It had betrayed Russia’s embrace and its Soviet past. How he longed to announce that the reckless president of that state would be arriving the next day to surrender and publicly repent for attempting to stab the motherland in the back. But that was not possible.
Anger seeps through his veins. It is no small matter for Russia to scale down its "Victory Day" parade for fear of a former actor named Zelensky’s drone threats. The tsar needed the master of the White House to intervene and secure the parade by mediating a brief truce. During the parade he looked at his generals, at the clusters of medals hanging from their chests. The odor of his disappointment filled the air. What use are all these medals if an actor's drones keep Moscow awake at night? It was as though Russia’s splendor had come to an end. Its generals shine at lavish banquets, not the battlefield. Comrades from North Korea took part in the parade. He has not forgotten that Kim Jong Un rescued the Russian army during its harshest battles in Ukraine. The Russian army also relied on thousands of mercenaries from Colombia, Africa, and the Arab world, a bitter stain on the history of the "Red Army."
The past few months have been especially brutal. Donald Trump sent his bombers and Iranian nuclear facilities were pounded. Israeli fighter jets roamed Tehran's skies like they had been on an excursion. The year began painfully too. Trump dispatched elite units who seized "Comrade" Nicolas Maduro and brought him before an American court like Noriega or Escobar. His "strategic partnership" with Russia did not save him. Castro's country is shaking in the agony of economic failure according to reports, and it can not avoid publicly admitting defeat and surrendering to geographical destiny for much longer.
There are many painful scenes. Israeli aircraft decimated Iran’s leadership, foremost among them the Supreme Leader himself. American planes rained bombs on the barracks and the prestige of the IRGC. Iran set off the Strait of Hormuz detonator, but the fleets of the "Great Satan" have surrounded its ports and strangled its economy.
Russia cannot risk confronting the American machine. Its strategic partnership with Iran will go no further than smuggling spare parts to allow Iran to replenish its drone arsenal. Besides, Russia needs the tweeting master of the White House to arrange the "Victory Day" truce and help find a way out of the Ukrainian swamp.
He understands his advisers, assistants, and flatterers. They have no interest in unsettling the decision-maker or provoking him. Their fate hinges on his mood. They sugarcoat death and cover the thorns with velvet. But the tsar knows. Rising oil prices do not change the fact that his country's economy is not in great shape, nor that the war has dragged on and that its agon has entered many homes.
Fortunately for him, the regime can keep the mothers of fallen soldiers from weeping on television screens. It criminalizes skepticism of the war or its objectives. True, he is not the president of America, forced to live in fear of newspaper headlines and the flames of social media. Russian media, like its security, is tightly controlled . But even that is not enough.
The war in Ukraine has dragged on and will soon outlast the Second World War. Every day coffins return from Ukraine wrapped in the Russian flag, as though the flag's only remaining function were to cover coffins.
The tsar knows. For the first time since his rise to power at the start of the century, his popularity is slipping in the polls, even if it remains far higher than Trump's. That is why he tried to offer a glimmer of hope, saying the war was nearing its end. Sometimes it occurs to him that he had entered the Kremlin to restore Russia's greatness just as Trump entered the White House to make America great again.
That week will not spare him from the painful scenes. The world's attention will turn to Xi Jinping and his guest Donald Trump. The talks will certainly not be easy. The global economy has been hit with the radiation of the Strait of Hormuz, and market fears have risen to unprecedented levels. Both presidents have many concerns and profound disagreements. On the table lie the troubled international economy, supply chains, tariffs, rare earth minerals, artificial intelligence, chips, and the feverish technological race, to say nothing about Taiwan. Fortunately for the world, the Chinese emperor has not dealt with "treacherous" Taiwan the way the Russian tsar has dealt with Ukraine. The question is whether Trump can satisfy Xi enough to use the Chinese key to unlock the Strait of Hormuz.
Vladimir the Great knows that the Chinese president now sits in the seat once reserved for Leonid Brezhnev. Newspapers will write of the global powers’ summit and how the fate of the world hangs in the balance, just as they had once written the same about Soviet-American summits. They will also write that the summit will merely manage their competition for first place and seek to prevent dangerous escalation. The contest for world leadership will remain between Washington and Beijing. Some will not hesitate to write that the best Trump can achieve is merely to delay the emergence of the "Chinese era."
Putin boasts of a "friendship without limits" that ties him to the man on Mao Zedong's throne. But the term "Chinese century" gives him pause when he reflects on his country’s geographic destiny. A technological and human flood. He thinks of something else.
Has the Russian Supreme Leader been wounded in the Ukrainian war? This question torments him. He looks in the mirror, trying to blame his age, smelling the autumn. But Xi was born only a year after him, and Trump was born six years before him. He has the sense that Russia itself has also been wounded. The wheel of time turns. From now on, Russian may have to content itself with playing in the second division.
