Don’t blame me Vladimir Putin’s grabbing the Crimea sixty years after I bestowed that lovely peninsula on Ukraine, the great Russian Breadbasket where I’d forged my political career and found a bride. Listen to my son, Sergei. He’s a wizard in computers and missiles and holds multiple advanced degrees and teaches at Brown University and anywhere else he wants and is an American citizen so you can trust when he explains my primary motive was economic, not personal, and that I wanted Ukraine to administer the entire hydroelectric dam project on the Dnieper River and send water for irrigation further south into the Crimea, and my gift proved an excellent motivator.

Putin’s a fool to trample my work. He may turn friends into enemies. I’m certainly his foe after this attack on my legacy. I’m sick of being assaulted. Can you imagine I lost my leadership because enemies claimed we’d been humiliated by the Cuban Missile Crisis. Listen, only one nation was humiliated, and that was the United States, which had first tried to conquer communist Cuba during the pitiful Bay of Pigs, and then, after I stationed tactical nuclear weapons on the island of comrade Fidel Castro, blundered the world to the precipice of nuclear annihilation before I forced John F. Kennedy to promise never again to invade Cuba. In exchange, I simply removed weapons that had been deployed to deter American aggression. That’s a Russian victory. That’s a communist tour de force. I should still be in command of the Soviet Union. If I’d stayed in control, we’d have buried the West.