By Taya Naydenko
The funniest thing in the past few days was this sinister warning from our intelligence services that suddenly surfaced all over the public channels:
Iran is preparing to strike Ukraine! With three ballistic missiles!!!
For those who aren’t quite familiar with the situation: Odessa and the surrounding region get hit by two or three ballistic missiles almost every day. Kyiv gets dozens of them about once a week.
Kyiv is mostly attacked at night. Odessa gets them in the morning or after lunch.
So in Odessa, a warning like, “Missiles heading for Odessa! Two! Three! City center, port, get ready!!!” followed by a sudden roar and whistle overhead and then an explosion — that’s everyday life. In Odessa and throughout the Odessa region. Chornomorsk is certainly getting hit no less these days, and sometimes even more.
So this ominous threat from Iran — three missiles — is basically our daily “precipitation forecast” for a single region. No, actually, I’m lying: it’s only part of our daily quota, because there are also Shaheds and Banderols coming at us — dozens of them, every single day.
My kids, my friends and I spent a couple of days laughing ourselves silly, competing to see who could come up with the best joke.
“Three! Three, for God’s sake! You can’t embarrass yourselves like that…”
“Maybe their intelligence people misunderstood something? Is this supposed to be a one-off, or are they planning to make it a regular thing?”
“Are they at least going to put some kind of markings on them? So we can tell them apart from everything else that’s flying at us…”
“They could tie ribbons to them! In the colors of the Iranian flag, for example! Otherwise it would be terribly disappointing if we didn’t even notice them!”
“Idiots! They could have saved themselves the missiles altogether. Just say they’d already launched them and claim responsibility for a couple of yesterday’s strikes on Ukraine.”
“Maybe that’s exactly what they’ll do!”
“And what’s the flight time going to be? We already know how it works from Crimea — a minute or two and it’s here. But how long would it take from Iran?”
“Well, I guess we’ll find out. Maybe they’ve already launched them and they’re already on their way. They just warned us a couple of days in advance so we’d have plenty of time to get properly scared!”
“I’m already scared enough, for God’s sake! There’s absolutely no need to add missiles to it. Yesterday someone slammed a car door next to me and I nearly pissed myself…”
“So basically, somebody should tell the Iranians they can just slam car doors really loudly. They could save themselves a few missiles!”
Although, of course, we all agree on one thing: even three pathetic missiles fired at Ukraine are exactly three missiles too many.
Then the same public channels reported that, “thanks to Ukrainian diplomatic efforts,” the threat of those three missiles had passed.
My guess is that our people simply laughed in the Iranians’ faces and sent them a compilation of Ukrainian jokes about the whole thing. And that was the extent of the “diplomatic efforts.”
Russia, meanwhile, still doesn’t understand our jokes. There’s a cultural gulf between us in that respect. So unfortunately, we have to explain things to them seriously — and loudly.
A pompous fool, as long as he remains friendly and doesn’t start throwing punches, is still something you can put up with.
