Neville Chamberlain, Philippe Pétain, and Vidkun Quisling walk into a coal-miners’ bar in Donetsk, in Russian-occupied Donbass, where a band of Putin-lookalikes is warming up for their evening set. The out-of-towners order three bottles of cheap vodka, one for each of them, but the bartender confesses he has only one bottle left, so they’ll have to compete for it. A singing contest, he says, and the band will play any melody you choose. The boys at the bar will vote on your singing.
Pétain went first, belting out Госуда́рственный гимн Росси́йской Федера́ции ‘State Anthem of the Russian Federation’ (lyrics from 2000, music from 1939), which got some appreciative catcalls but mostly polite applause.
Next up, Quisling performed a surprisingly seductive rendition of Подмосковные вечера ‘Moscw Nights’, a Soviet Russian patriotic song from 1956, and the guys at the bar went wild, miming lewdly what they’d do on their patriotic Moscow nights.
