Watching Vladimir Putin in recent weeks has put me in mind of a classic scene from the Simpsons, in which Mr Burns chides Grandpa Simpson for his "clownish behaviour" as the two stand in, appropriately enough, a graveyard.
Mr Burns: "Oh Simpson, can't you go five seconds without humiliating yourself?"
(Grandpa Simpson's braces snap with a comedy twang, and his trousers fall down)
Grandpa Simpson: "How long was that?"
Putin's current wave of humiliations began on May 9th with the Victory Day parade in Moscow, the only reasonable response to which was "u OK hun???". Normally a day of bombast, bravado, copious military hardware and not mentioning the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, this year was a little different. Putin looked sickly, wizened and preoccupied (whatever with??) while the apparently ailing Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko couldn't even make it to the end of the ceremony. A solitary tank rolled through Red Square, its engine noise drowned out by the sound of thousands of documentary makers around the world rubbing their hands at the montage sequences to come.
"Vladimir Putin believed his army would walk into Kyiv in three days with minimal losses," said the Adam Curtis voice in my head. "But that was a fantasy."
Since May 9th almost nothing has gone right for genocidal old Vova, and so much has gone wrong that it's worth recapping the main humiliations in full. This will likely provoke follow-up questions such as "Where is this guy's imposter syndrome?", "Does he cringe himself to sleep at night?", and "Has he developed a humiliation kink?". Those are for another day though, and hopefully a better-qualified dictator-psychologist.
Let's start with the heavy-duty stuff: earlier in May, one of Russia's "hypersonic" Khnizal missiles, which Putin had said was unstoppable and able to evade any missile-defence system, was shot down over Kyiv. Not satisfied with just that rebuke, Moscow removed all doubt about their it-turns-out eminently stoppable Khnizals by having many more shot down in the following weeks, including six at one time on the night of May 16th. Russia threw just about every kind of missile and drone available to them at Kyiv that night and still failed to do anything more than make a lot of noise.
Then we come to the ruins of the town of Bakhmut, which the Kremlin and the Wagner mercenary group chief Yevgeniy Prigozhin claimed was fully captured at the weekend after nearly a year of fighting. An embarrassingly insignificant prize to be trumpeting in itself, any triumphalism in Moscow has been further undercut by Prigozhin's regular outbursts against the regular Russian army's leadership, and now against the invasion as a whole. Having become a Tik Tok meme a couple of weeks ago with a screaming demand for more ammunition that resembled nothing so much as a boiled egg gaining demonic sentience during a bad acid trip, Prigozhin broadened the scope of his criticism in an interview earlier this week.
"We've made Ukraine a nation which everybody knows around the world," he said. "As for demilitarisation, if at the start of the special operation they had 500 tanks hypothetically speaking, now they have 5,000 tanks. If 20,000 men were able to fight, now it's 400,000. Fuck knows how, but we've militarised Ukraine."
This week has also brought the eye-rubbing spectacle of lengthy incursions into Russian territory by the Russian Volunteer Corps and Liberty of Russia Legion, two paramilitary groups of anti-Putin Russian nationals. The main consequence of these was to highlight the lack of protection Russia now has at home, and to at a stroke vastly lengthen the line its stretched forces must defend. That line now includes the whole of Russia's internationally recognised border with Ukraine as well as the frontlines in the east and south of Ukrainian territory. Again, the Kremlin's capacity for self-owning came to the fore almost immediately, with tall tales of having killed scores of "saboteurs" and amateurish and swiftly debunked images showing lines of "dead" fighters and destroyed military vehicles that had been winched into place for the occasion.
Yesterday, research by independent Russian journalists revealed that between January and May of this year Russian courts dealt with 1,053 cases of military personnel going awol - more than in the whole of 2022. Well you would, wouldn't you?
And in the most abjectly slapstick of Putin's recent Ls, the Kremlin released a video of an official showing him a specific map from the 17th century that "has no Ukraine". A ludicrous basis on which to claim Ukraine is not a country. But wait! There's more! Specifically, the easily legible word "Ukraine" emblazoned on the map just to the east of the Dnipro river.
Who knows where humiliation's apparently irresistible bouquet will lead Vladimir Putin in the days and weeks to come. And who knows if the Kremlin will be able to come up with anything more credible in response than the question: "How long was that?"