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Russian Bears Have Notorious, Vicious Reputation

Russian Bears Have Notorious, Vicious Reputation
(Serghei Starus/Dreamstime)

A. Craig Copetas By Thursday, 20 February 2025 02:39 PM EST Current | Bio | Archive

Things happen.

“Think of it,” President Donald Trump mused along with his hundreds of millions of social media followers.

“A modestly successful comedian, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, talked the United States of America into spending $350 billion to go into a war that couldn’t be won, that never had to start, but a war that he, without the U.S. and ‘Trump,’ will never be able to settle.”

At one time, such a sentiment would have been unthinkable.

But things have changed. The new normal nowadays is an American president describing the leader of a democratic country under the murderous jackboot of Russian President Vladimir Putin as “a Dictator without Elections.”

“I trust President Trump,” was Missouri Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt’s response to the president junking what was once the GOP’s core foreign policy principle; specifically, a strong and united defense against Russian belligerence and imperial ambitions.

“To say that Trump is lying to the American public about Zelenskyy, Ukraine, and Putin is the same as affirming that water is wet,” said Anastasiya Shapochkina, director of the geopolitical consultancy Eastern Circles at Sciences Po in Paris. “Why is Trump lying? Why is he trying to sell Putin’s falsehoods to Congress and the electorate? Those are the questions.”

Putin’s chief propagandist Vladimir Solovyov said he knows the answer.

“Trump wants Zelenskyy to give back the money,” Solovyov said on Russian state television. “Why not create a military and economic collation of Russia and America and divide Europe to hell. It’s a great idea.”

For those absent that day, Zelenskyy was legally elected in 2019; Russia triggered the conflict when its armed forces annexed Crimea in 2014, and then in 2022 launched a full-throttled invasion of Ukraine.

The next round of Ukrainian elections has been lawfully paused until the end of the war.

No surprise, the emanations from Washington has bumfuzzled France’s existentialist President Emmanuel Macron.

“We do not understand President Trump’s logic,” French government spokesperson Sophie Primas said. “We are left trying to find consistency.”

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is left trying to find rodents.

“Zelenskyy is a cornered rat,” said Medvedev, one of Putin’s closest chums and deputy head of the Kremlin’s security council. “Zelenskyy’s behavior can be completely unpredictable. He scurries around, squeaks frantically. Any provocation can be expected from a shaking rodent.”

The same is true about the Russian bear (Ursus arctos), the world’s largest terrestrial carnivore and the favored metaphor for the Russian nation. Cannibalism occurs more frequently among this species than among any other animal group, including rats.

Born with an incessantly antagonistic disposition and an innate ability to camouflage that fact, the Russian bear uses his viciousness as a weapon.

With stocky feet, small eyes, a broad head, and 20 highly curved claws that are impossible to retract, the Russian bear strikes without notice and eats his victim completely.

On and off, I’ve spent nearly five decades alongside professional hunters stalking bears that attack villages in Russia’s taiga region.

These are justly tough men, and they don’t sip gin Rickeys while dissecting the White House-Kremlin’s foreign policy initiatives in country clubs.

They will tell you Russian leaders, like their quarry, are far more preoccupied with wielding ultimate power over their domain than with developing strategy.

Back in 2004, they said all the time I’d spent living, studying and writing about Russian culture and politics made me ill-prepared to grasp what Putin intended to unleash on the world.

“Do not pay attention to Putin’s facial features,” the huntsman warned during our 2004 expedition northeast of Archangel. A bear’s facial muscles are so poorly developed that it’s impossible for the creature to make the expressions that other species normally use to telegraph their intentions.

“Even a sick bear can handle a lamb like Trump,” the huntsman reminded me during a recent phone conversation.

And Putin is not your average bear.

The Russian language has a word for bears that refuse to hibernate in winter.

They’re called shatooni, and every U.S. negotiator in the same room as Putin had better commit the word to memory.

Tsar Ivan the Terrible was fond of setting shatooni on his subjects for the sheer pleasure of seeing how they would destroy their victims.

Later, tsars had the teeth of captured shatooni filed down into stumps; dogs were then released upon them, with spectators gambling on the outcome of tooth versus claw.

Boyars, the noblemen of Old Muscovy and distant ancestors of Putin’s corrupt oligarchs and their “Kremlin Ration,” indulged in the practice of pouring alcohol into muzzled shatooni.

Trump and the individuals he’s dispatched to negotiate with Putin might suspect this is the stuff of folklore.

Do so at your peril.

A shatoon — particularly one with thermonuclear claws — is so extremely savage and ruthless that there are records of them rising from apparent death to devour those who think they’ve won the conflict.

The shatoon is a beast of such dementia that the word for centuries has been employed in the taiga as a cautionary noun to describe ruthless Russian leaders who, as a star-dusted Russian aphorism guarantees, “will be made devils at once in the next world.”

As Putin framed the proverb in 2014, shortly after seizing Crimea: “The bear never asks permission,” Putin said.

© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.


ACraigCopetas
Born with an incessantly antagonistic disposition and an innate ability to camouflage that fact, the Russian bear uses his viciousness as a weapon.
copetas, russia, bear, reputation
872
2025-39-20
Thursday, 20 February 2025 02:39 PM
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