White elephant

If coverage in the Russian state-run and related media is anything to go by, we must admit that the divorce of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt is immeasurably more important to the state known as Russian Federation than the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) jubilee summit.

At first I tried to obtain a precise quantitative ratio but then stopped doing this when I saw that the governmental Rossiyskaya gazeta alone carried far more reports on how Pitt and Angelina comment on this event than on such a high-profile event as CIS jubilee summit.

Incidentally, this made me ponder again on why the government of Russia funds this publication. And can we consider publications in the Russian government’s press organ about the Hollywood stars’ divorce as the official position of the Russian government on this most important problem? The same applies to horoscopes. In all probability, the continuous publication of them on the last page of Rossiyskaya gazeta means that Russia’s Cabinet recognizes astrology as a science – in a sharp contrast to the position of the Russian Academy of Sciences – which in turn explains why the Russian government is so purposefully destroying its own country’s academy of sciences.

In 2016 Rossiyskaya gazeta received more than 1.49 billion rubles from the budget to finance its circulation for those entitled to social privileges. I failed to find the total amount of state subsidies to this pro-governmental publication, as did, incidentally, the meticulous Vedomosti. But even this is quite a lot if you take into account that 502 Russian publications have received a mere 270 million rubles as subsidies for “socially important projects.”

Yet, speaking of real importance, the divorce of Jolie and Pitt is, of course, more important than the CIS summit, although there many things in common, as well as many differences, between the two events. In each of the cases, it is an unsuccessful project. But, while Angelina and Brad, who have lived in marriage for two years, have agreed that their marital project is a failure and decided to terminate it, the heads of 11 states have been pulling the leg of their peoples and the entire world for 25 years now instead of saying the truth: there is no trace of any commonwealth of independent states. And what occurred 25 years ago was not the formation of an alliance but a divorce of the political elites that were fed up to death with one another.

A group photograph in Rossiyskaya gazeta, which was supposed to illustrate that the CIS is still alive, shows 11 men wearing suits and neckties. But there are only seven heads of state among these eleven. The presidents of four states had some more important things to do. Turkmenistan was represented by a vice premier, Uzbekistan by the foreign minister, Moldova delegated the premier, while Ukraine just sent its ambassador to Kyrgyzstan to behold the summit. And why not? He is stationed there in any case, let him drop in, and there’s no need to buy a ticket.

Ambassador Mykola Doroshenko dropped in and caused a small scandal, saying that Russia must not hold the CIS presidency in 2017 because it stole Crimea. Secondly, he warned that Ukraine would not recognize the results of the census in CIS countries if Russia counted the population of Crimea. Putin said in answer to this that Ukraine had not signed the commonwealth’s charter and, accordingly, could not make proposals about the summit’s agenda.

The Russian state-run press considered this answer as another major diplomatic victory of Putin, this time over Ukraine, and the comments of the Kremlin’s shills on Putin’s words abounded in such verbs as “brushed off,” “put down,” and other similar epithets from the lingo of a shared apartment’s kitchen.

In reality, the position of Russia’s president, who said Ukraine has “uncertain status” in the CIS, makes Petro Poroshenko and the Verkhovna Rada face the problem of choosing between the two more or less reasonable ways of behavior with respect to the CIS. You should either leave this absolutely fake formation altogether or go on participating in these summits, showing to the entire world the complete worthlessness of this organization, i.e., making these powwows assume a totally grotesque form. This can be done by delegating to CIS summits a Ukrainian embassy attache endowed with the talent of a comic actor. There must be people in Ukraine’s diplomatic corps that used to take part in the Club of the Funny and Inventive People as part of such teams as Odesa Gentlemen, Quarter 95, or Voroshilov Sharpshooters.

Incidentally, this is exactly the way Russia is shaping its foreign policy whose hallmarks are today the coughing Lavrov, the inarticulate Churkin, and, of course, Maria Zakharova, the chief media dollface of Russia’s Foreign Ministry. You can only grasp the meaning of what these people are doing if you presume that they are simply trolling the world community in an effort to pass off satire as diplomacy. And once on a nice day the three of them will hold a big press conference for the world’s leading media. They will come up on the stage, arm in arm, take off their ginger wigs and big red noses and cry out in chorus: “Here we are-e-e!” Then they will laugh heartily, take a bow, and ask: “Did you really believe that it was the foreign policy of a huge country? We just took you for a ride. It was a joke, you see.”

Absolutely everything this trio and the rest of Russia’s Foreign Ministry are doing quite fits in with the abovementioned hypothesis if, of course, you presume that the goal of foreign policy is to increase the number of allies and the influence of your country in the world. And here is what, for example, Zakharova has said, to achieve this goal, in the past two days in NTV programs alone. “What is going on in Ukraine is a tragicomedy, when the president of that country comes over and begins to teach something to somebody,” the “official spokesperson of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs” says to the entire world. If you don’t look at the screen and are only guided by intonations and content, you can think that it is a brazen woman with curlpapers and two black eyes on who is bawling out her shared-apartment neighbor for soaking the laundry in the bathtub, while others have no place to wash themselves.

Or take a Russia 24 TV program with her participation. Commenting on the US Secretary of State John Kerry’s speech on Syria, when the American politicians said he had an impression that Russia was in a parallel reality, Zakharova alleged that Kerry had put on a show for the media and a mass-scale audience. “The show is bad because it is poor, scanty, and without facts. It breaks down at once,” the well-known show-woman concluded in a professional manner.

This total trolling has resulted in the cosmic loneliness of Russia, which is impossible to hide with cardboard-like stage settings, such as the CIS. This setting relies today on the ambitions of Putin and the goodwill of two persons – Lukashenko and Nazarbayev. Here is what the two said at the jubilee summit.

Lukashenko: “The result of the CIS’s 25th anniversary is deplorable – from better to worse. And we will never bring back the radiant times of cooperation.”

Nazarbayev: “Joint work, links and ties are very weak. We adopt an enormous number of decisions that nobody fulfills.”

The summit’s hospitable host, President Almazbek Atambayev of Kyrgyzstan, tried to improve the somber mood of the participants and said that “the commonwealth has succeeded as a universal debate ground for the heads of state, who always have things to discuss.” So it is clear now: the CIS is a discussion club.

As a sign of gratitude for loyalty, Putin thanked Kyrgyzstan for holding the nomad games and compared them favorably to the intrigue-infested Olympic Games. It is perhaps Russia’s true choice – to break off at last the left, westward-looking, head of the imperial eagle, saddle a Tatar horse, this time for good, and ride east across the boundless Russian plain, thus answering the eternal Russian question: who are we, Europe or Asia?