From Russia, With Love

How the Son of the Evil Empire is Plotting Its Sequel

Somewhere between the Kremlin and a hollowed-out volcano, Vladimir Putin strokes a hairless cat while plotting how best to convince the world he’s just a misunderstood patriot protecting his borders.

It’s not working—at least not for anyone who slept within the blast radius of the deadly Russian missile attack on Kyiv last Thursday, which killed twelve and injured 90 more, including children. For all the talk of new diplomacy and strategic ambiguity, Russia under Putin remains a refurbished Bond villain lair with slightly better Wi-Fi and no moral compass.

In the role of Dr. No, we find Putin: a cold-blooded, KGB-trained operative with a nuclear arsenal, a penchant for poisoning political opponents, and a geopolitical agenda akin to SPECTRE in a James Bond film. Lest you forget, SPECTRE stands for Special Executive for Counter-Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion—all of them arts practiced out of the Kremlin long before Ronald Reagan labeled the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire over 40 years ago.

Let’s not forget that this is the same Russia that invades sovereign neighbors with the same casual flair Bond uses to order martinis. Ukraine wasn’t Putin’s first dance with territorial conquest; it’s just the one with the best drone footage. Before that? Georgia. Crimea. And, if the vodka flows just right, Moldova is next.

“But Russia is only protecting its borders,” some now say. Sure. And Dr. No was just a misunderstood island dweller with a high-interest mortgage on a nuclear reactor.

This is a man who jails opposition leaders, murders defectors with radioactive tea, and builds churches out of missile casings. Not exactly the hallmark of a misunderstood reformer. Putin doesn’t want peace; he wants payback — for the humiliation of the USSR, for NATO expansion, for the fall of the Berlin Wall, and probably for every time a Russian athlete was disqualified for doping.

Meanwhile, Russia’s domestic propaganda machine plays reruns of Stalin's greatest hits and rebrands autocracy as “traditional values.” Its diplomats lie with a smirk. It is not a nation with a vision; it is a grudge in a fur hat.

It’s time we stopped pretending that Putin’s Russia is anything other than the ideological heir of the Soviet machine Reagan spent his presidency dismantling. If the USSR was the Evil Empire, then Russia is its bitter, bottle-fed son — raised on Cold War resentment and fed a steady diet of cyber espionage, military parades, and gas pipelines.

Let’s call it what it is: a rogue regime in tailored suits, backed by oil money and fueled by a serious case of imperial nostalgia. Meanwhile, as the West debates which sanctions package sounds the most appealing, Russia has allied itself with… wait for it… China, Iran, and North Korea.

So here’s your briefing, Commander Bond:

• Russia does not represent a post-Soviet success story.

• It’s a villain in a velvet-lined power suit, who continues to play by KGB rules.

• And unless we want to be the ones trapped in the shark tank, it’s time to act as though we know who the villain is.

From Russia, with love? Hardly.
It’s from Russia, with loathing.
With hacking.
With hollow promises and hollow-point bullets.

If the West doesn’t wake up and stop auditioning for the role of Neville Chamberlain, we won’t just be watching a real-life sequel – we’ll be starring in it. This is real life. Putin isn’t playing Bond’s nemesis. He’s playing ours.

This time, it’s not “From Russia, With Love." It’s “To the West, With Consequences.”