The Adventures Of Vladimir Plutinplot In The Modern Age (Grim Version) by Alfred N.Muggins

    Russia’s greatest chess player (according to him!) was on a roll. His soldiers had done quite well really. They hadn’t quite achieved all their objectives very quickly. For example Kiev had taken so long to crack that he had had to pull his pawns back from there in the end. But after the expenditure of many missiles his forces did manage to outflank and force the peasant Ukrainians back from Donbass. And his Black Sea Fleet ravaged the coast and Ukraine’s apartment blocks quite thoroughly in the end. When half the population of Ukraine had become refugees he knew he would eventually grind them down.

    It had worked for his proteges the Assad family in Syria. Most of the rebel sympathisers and democrats had fled the ruins of the country by the end of the main conflict, so they could easily steamroll over the rebel cities and reduce them to rubble, with the die hards still inside. He knew he could do that in Ukraine too if he chose.

    Like Timurlaine and Stalin before him he ground the enemies of the state down until they were mere bones in the ruins. Nothing could stand before him as his revival of the old Soviet Union and its Russian centred Imperial predecessor continued. Russians were very good at following orders, and although some were cowards and some sympathised too closely with the western liberal Nazis mythical paradise, they followed direct orders in the end, because they knew he meant them.

     It was finally done. Ukraine was a pile of rubble, under the natural tutelage of its superior Mother Russia, and he had emptied it of its population of criminals and Cossacks, kulaks, and Nazis! NATO, which might have made a difference if they had thrown their missiles and jets into the fight, failed to intervene fully, as he had suspected. The real westerners, they did not like to fight. They would run from any conflict, and had proved that many times over, most recently in Afghanistan. They had thrown their money into the fight, buying good weapons for the Ukrainians, pretending he could not see what they were doing. While he had reduced the Ukrainian resistance gradually they had sat on the sidelines, improving their own defences, supplying the Ukrainians with much of what they needed, but failing to turn out on the real battlefield to make a difference.

     In the end there was nothing left of Ukraine, and while his own pawns had been mauled and taken significant losses, he had more soldiers to send to the meatgrinder of war. Because of the favours he had done for the Syrian Government he could ask them for some of their no longer fully employed soldiers. And the now subservient Chechens could be forced to supply some of their soldiers.

     The real question was where should he go next? He really wanted Poland, because they had taken most of the Ukrainian refugees, and their now westernised people were keen to fight against him. Not since Father Stalin had cleverly reduced the Polish resistance by letting the Nazis finish them off before he came to liberate Warsaw, had the Russian military spent much time here. But he would be best attacking the Baltic States which had once been part of Soviet and Imperial Russia, not so long ago!

    (to be continued one day soon!)