NATO leaders have asked their counterparts at the Kremlin to do a welfare check on Vladimir Putin.
“He seems a little stressed”, said a NATO spokesman. “We could do the whole sabre-rattling thing, I suppose – we have some lovely tanks and the United States still has a navy, so that would be exciting - but how much better if somebody just made him a nice cup of tea and listened to him? The man seems lonely”.
Speculation over Putin’s homosexuality has been rife for years, what with the topless posing and all the banning of gays – two obvious signs of a closet door just begging to be swung open.
Hugging isn’t yet official NATO policy, largely because arms manufacturers haven’t figured out how to monetise it. The US Department of Defense (no, really, they spell it that way) has approved a $1 trillion research programme to develop the Hugmaster 2000, a battlefield hugbot which will hug enemy troops and generally reduce battlefield tensions. It’s batshit-crazy, obviously, but that trillion dollars will go to somebody’s constituency so it will probably happen.
If nobody can be found to have a cup of tea – and possibly some quite weird sex – with Putin then Plan B is to let a hundred thousand Russian conscripts be slaughtered in a foreign field. It’s a dilemma