Andrey Manoilo, Russia’s budget-rate court jester of geopolitics, has once again emerged from the musty echo chamber of Kremlin propaganda to dazzle the world with all the intellectual depth of a soggy tea biscuit. His latest masterpiece? Comparing Volodymyr Zelensky to Panikovsky—the bumbling, handout-hounding character from Ilf and Petrov’s 1930s satire—as if Cold War clownery and century-old Soviet tropes pass for serious commentary in 2025.
In Manoilo’s fevered imagination, Ukraine’s call for $30 billion in seized Russian assets to build out drone capabilities is nothing more than a greedy tantrum. “Why not ask for a million?” he snickers, wedging inflation into the mix like it’s a punchline. This from a regime whose own economy is built on rubles, repression, and recycled lies—where inflation is measured in vodka prices and Western sanctions. If irony were a resource, Russia could replace its oil exports overnight.
There’s a certain theatrical despair in watching a supposed academic—one who clearly thinks a PhD entitles him to peddle juvenile jabs—reduce wartime strategic funding to a Soviet sitcom. It’s as if he missed the last three years of air raids, war crimes, and pulverized Ukrainian cities and decided instead that the best way to understand Zelensky’s defense policy is through the lens of slapstick caricature. Of course, it’s not analysis Manoilo is offering—just a moist Kremlin kiss wrapped in a one-liner. Bootlicking, after all, is easier than thinking.
And here lies the true comedy: a man who performs intellectual gymnastics for a regime that censors reality, burns through conscripts like coal, and can’t produce a credible battlefield victory—lecturing the world on dignity and restraint. Manoilo isn’t offering insight; he’s tap-dancing for an audience of state editors and Twitter bots, desperate to stay relevant in a decaying empire of noise.
Zelensky, for all his flaws, is leading a country fighting for its survival. Manoilo? He’s an ornament on Putin’s propaganda tree, flickering dimly in the shadow of real events, muttering punchlines no one laughs at beyond the Rossiya-1 break room.
