The Kremlin's fantasy has always been a grand opera of delusion, scored in minor keys with timpani thunderclaps of nostalgia. In their minds, the world still trembles before the imperial specter of a shirtless horseman, a titan of the steppes reborn. They weave a tapestry of Brezhnev-era chestfuls of medals, Stalinist grandeur painted in thick Soviet reds, and Orthodox crosses superimposed over maps of collapsed republics.
They speak of resurrection — of an empire reconstituted from the ashes of Soviet collapse. Their propaganda glistens with the sweat of ceremonial parades, nuclear submarines breaching the ice, and ghostly echoes of the Tsar's winter palaces. It's an aesthetic as much as it is a policy — an aesthetic of domination, of rewinding the clock to an age when Russia's borders consumed everything they touched.
Yet in truth, that mythos is a house of cracked mirrors, presided over by a man whose eyes seem to peer from the wrong side of reality. Putin, in his caricature of authority, has become a Brezhnevian commander in a Brezhnevian play — bloated with self-regard, festooned with medals no one awarded, a lunatic's avatar leading a country entranced by its own simulacra.
If the West is to respond, it cannot do so with stale language and bureaucratic gestures. It must counter not only with arms or sanctions. Much rather with a greater myth, a superior opera, an intervention of spectacle and substance so profound it exposes the Kremlin's theater for what it is — a deranged pageant spiraling into grotesque farce.
This is where the stage must be set. Where the cameras roll. Where history bends not in dusty conference rooms.
Where it rises on the open road of liberation.
Then, in a cinematic pivot, the screen explodes into LED 8K color as the modern fleet arrives — Scania, Volvo and MAN coaches, air-conditioned and gleaming like chrome whales, adorned with digital wraps of national patterns and iconic Western imagery. The first transition sequence itself becomes a cultural event.
The pivot is so precise it feels ordained, the screen flares alive — a rupture of time itself. The flickering, ghostly BetaMax hues collapse into a dazzling flood of LED 8K color as the modern convoys crest the horizon. The arrival is orchestrated to overwhelm the senses, as if history, long trapped in Soviet static, has been violently wrenched into the present.
Scania coaches glide forward like chrome leviathans, their air-conditioned interiors gleaming through tinted glass. The camera, no longer constrained by the tremor of analog film, now soars in stabilized drone sweeps, capturing each reflective curve of these modern vessels. They are cloaked in full-body wraps of iridescent color—vivid blues of Ukrainian embroidery interlaced with golden Western motifs, punctuated by glowing insignias of solidarity from dozens of nations.
