‘Putin’s Last Term: Part Z’

Animator Egor Zhgun retells Russia’s past six years in cartoons

When Vladimir Putin returned to the presidency in 2012 after a brief hiatus as prime minister, animator Egor Zhgun published a brooding, two-minute cartoon retelling Russia’s history under Putin. The video depicts the president as Mr. Burns and other Russian public figures as different characters from the American series “The Simpsons.” Zhgun’s video and an updated sequel he released six years later are modeled on photographer Noah Kalina’s 2006 timelapse project, “Everyday,” and feature the same titular song by Carly Comando. As the years pass in Zhgun’s cartoons, Putin morphs into a desiccated monster, ending first as a barely conscious pharaoh on life support and then as Gollum clutching an outline of Crimea. On March 22, 2024, five days after Putin claimed his fifth term in office, Zhgun released a third installment in his Putin series, “Part Z.” It is the darkest yet. The video contains so many political and cultural references that Meduza broke it down, so you can watch it and understand everything.

Prologue

Alexey Navalny’s fight against the Kremlin bookends “Putin’s Last Term: Part Z.” The video opens with a crowned Putin asking his Magic Mirror who is the fairest in the land. The mirror communicates through a secret police officer represented by illustrator Vasya Lozhkin’s iconic painting “The Motherland Hears.” The agent in the mirror shakes his head, and Alexey Navalny appears in his place, speaking in a suit from a podium with the logo of his 2018 presidential campaign. Navalny was Russia’s only politician who ran a traditional public campaign in 2017, barnstorming regions of Russia that rarely get attention in national elections. Federal election figures rejected his candidacy registration on December 25, 2017.

The segment ends with Putin narrowing his eyes and steepling his fingers. We will return to this conflict in the video’s conclusion.

Picking up where Zhgun left off in 2018

Occupying Crimea

When we last saw Zhgun’s Putin at his desk, the president had transformed into Gollum, flanked by monitors displaying the hammer march from Pink Floyd’s “The Wall,” albeit hammers in the shape of double-headed eagles, Russia’s coat of arms, which Zhgun first illustrated in February 2014. Now, we’re back, and Putin has returned to his respectable business suit.

Telegram

As Navalny’s 2018 presidential campaign haunts the mirror on the wall, the character Ralph Wiggum runs across Putin’s desk, chasing a paper airplane in the shape of the Telegram logo. Ralph wears an arm patch with the symbol of Roskomnadzor, Russia’s federal censor. In 2018, this agency started ordering Russian Internet service providers to block access to the messaging app Telegram. Officials eventually lifted the ban in 2020 after failing to stop Russians from using the service — a defeat embodied in Ralph peeing his pants.

The 2018 FIFA World Cup

The clouds suddenly part, the Sun emerges, and even a rainbow streaks across the sky as Russia hosts the 2018 FIFA World Cup. Zhgun revisits the lighthearted fun of the tournament, recalling the three fans in kokoshnik traditional Russian headdresses, whose group photo while eating in the stands inspired a series of wholesome, silly memes. Zhgun celebrates the salute between head coach Stanislav Cherchesov and Artem Dzyuba, Russia’s World Cup hero. (Here, Dzyuba performs his trademark double-handed salute — the left hand on his head is meant to imitate a hat because Russian military tradition bars saluting when bareheaded.)

Pre-pandemic Russia

Pensioners

With the World Cup over, the sky behind Putin grows overcast as the Chief Wiggum character arrives on the president’s monitor to deliver some bad news to a group of senior citizens waiting in line. The chief raises a sign reading, “You must be THIS age” — an allusion to legislation enacted in October 2018 to hike Russia’s retirement ages from 55 to 60 for women, and from 60 to 65 for men. The new policy was deeply unpopular with millions of Russians.

Ivan Golunov

In June 2019, Moscow police arrested Meduza correspondent Ivan Golunov on spurious drug possession charges. The incident provoked a rapid collective response from independent Russian news outlets, including identical front-page spreads in the business newspapers Vedomosti, Kommersant, and RBC featuring the stylized slogan: “I/WE = IVAN GOLUNOV.” Five days after his arrest, amid the outpouring of support, Golunov was released and cleared of all charges. Five of the officers involved in fabricating the charges against him were later fined and sentenced to prison, though the masterminds who sought Golunov’s imprisonment (likely because of his investigations into funeral services corruption) remain at large.

2019 Russian regional elections

Now Alexey Navalny returns to the Magic Mirror and slowly transforms into Mr. Incredible (from the Pixar movies). On Putin’s monitor, riot police perform the Dance of the Little Swans from Swan Lake over an announcement for Russia’s United Voting Day on September 8, 2019. Throughout the summer, Moscow witnessed several public protests against election officials’ decision to bar independent candidates from the City Duma race. These demonstrations led to a police crackdown and numerous felony prosecutions.

The Pandemic era

COVID-19 lockdown

Zhgun depicts the coronavirus as a hybrid of Homer Simpson and Shrek, emerging from his outhouse with a triumphant whoop. The coming lockdowns will empower the Putin regime in dramatic new ways. The secret police return to the Magic Mirror, and Putin’s office (his curtains now drawn completely) is festooned with frightening PSAs about COVID-19. The president also drinks from a fast-food “Bunker King” cup — a reference to the “Bunker Grandpa” meme that spread about Putin due to his strict self-isolation during the pandemic. Later, we see a sign above one of the doors in Putin’s office that reads, “Attention: For entry into and exit from the bunker, a QR code is required.” This refers to how the Russian authorities relied heavily on QR codes when issuing permits for access and the right of movement in large cities like Moscow.

Amending Russia’s Constitution

Continuing the Shrek theme, Zhgun depicts election officials in Russia’s national plebiscite on constitutional amendments as a fairy who magically transforms a tree stump into a ballot box. In June 2020, despite the ongoing pandemic lockdown, Russia mobilized voters to endorse reforms that would make it legal for Putin to remain in office until 2036. Officials got so loosey-goosey with the rules that voting was allowed in all kinds of unusual places, including on a bus, at a playground, and infamously atop a tree stump. As the ballots pour in, a crown materializes atop Putin’s head. He is now a monarch.

The Lukashenko regime teeters

Belarus saw its biggest anti-government protests ever between May 2020 and March 2021, before and after Alexander Lukashenko dubiously claimed more than 80 percent of the vote in the August 2020 Belarusian presidential election. The Belarusian dictator ultimately prevailed, thanks in part to Russian support amid a brutal police crackdown that turned the tide against the protesters. Zhgun captures Lukashenko’s infamous publicity stunt when he wore a bulletproof vest and brandished a rifle near the Palace of Independence in Minsk while accompanied by armed soldiers and his then 15-year-old son Kolya. Zhgun also juxtaposes the official Belarusian flag with the white-red-white flag adopted by the opposition.

Depictions of Lukashenko as a mustachioed chirping bird predate these events. In one of the earliest, perhaps original, iterations of this meme, Lukashenko chirps (in an onomatopoeia meant to capture the Belarusian accent) when asked a hard-hitting question about the economic situation in Belarus.

Alexey Navalny’s poisoning and return to Russia

Superhero Navalny suddenly disappears from the Magic Mirror and is replaced by “Winged Doom,” also known as “The Omsk Bird.” Based on an original character created by artist Heiko Muller, this bird cartoon has come to be associated on the Russian Internet with “everything psychedelic, surreal, and drug-induced” and specifically with the message: “Welcome to Omsk!” On Putin’s monitor, Winged Doom is dressed as a doctor and appears with the text: “Don’t try to leave Omsk.”

These images refer to the August 2020 assassination attempt on Navalny, when he was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok before boarding a plane in Tomsk. Pilots made an emergency landing in Omsk, and Navalny was offloaded for medical treatment. He spent two days at a local hospital, where administrators initially refused to release him for care elsewhere.

Putin’s monitor also references the Underpants Gnomes of South Park and their infamously nonsensical business plan to “profit” from “collecting underpants.” In a glass display case to Putin’s right, a pair of blue undershorts now shimmers. These nods to Navalny’s skivvies refer to where the Federal Security Service’s assassins reportedly applied the Novichok poison.

By now, we also have a clear view of two briefcases on the floor to Putin’s right, one bearing the biohazard symbol and the inscription “#2.” Zhgun told Meduza that he originally intended this image to refer to reports in June 2022 that Putin’s bodyguards “bag up his excrement while he is abroad […] to stop foreign powers from gathering information about the Russian leader’s health.” However, Zhgun said the sight gag also works as an allusion to Novichok.

Suddenly, Winged Doom is kicked from the frame by Mrs. Incredible — Zhgun’s depiction of Yulia Navalnaya rushing to Omsk and waging a successful public campaign to secure her husband’s release to the Charité hospital in Berlin, where Navalny later recovered. Next, the superhero Navalnys return to Putin’s screen alongside Philip J. Fry from Futurama, whose head is partially shaved to represent popular YouTuber Yury Dud. In October 2020, Dud released a feature-length interview with the Navalnys, recorded in Germany. (That video now has more than 38 million views; its YouTube thumbnail shows Dud with the same quizzical expression as Fry in Zhgun’s cartoon.)

Then Navalny sheds his Mr. Incredible persona and appears as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 Terminator character. The Russian text on the screen reads, “I called. He confessed,” referring to Navalny’s December 2020 YouTube video (which uses footage that appears in the Oscar-winning 2022 American documentary film directed by Daniel Roher) showing how he fooled FSB operative Konstantin Kudryavtsev into sharing secret details about the agency’s attempt on his life. Zhgun’s Terminator references foreshadow Navalny’s burial in March 2024, when his coffin was lowered into the ground as the film’s soundtrack played, alluding to the T-800’s heroic submersion in molten metal. The movie was reportedly one of Navalny’s favorites.

Restored as Mr. and Mrs. Incredible, the Navalnys board a plane and share a final private moment before the feed is cut. Navalny is then trapped again in the Magic Mirror and forms a heart with his hands — the gesture he famously made to his wife in a Moscow courtroom during a hearing in February 2021.

The big shift

A bloodbath

With Alexey Navalny behind bars, Zhgun’s camera pulls back to reveal a grander, more diabolic setting in Putin’s office. To the right, there’s a bathtub filled with blood and antlers, referring to an investigative report by journalists at Proekt Media that cites claims by the president’s acquaintances that he bathes in an extract made from boiled deer antlers, supposedly to boost his cardiovascular system and rejuvenate his skin. (By this point in Zhgun’s cartoon, incidentally, Putin’s skin has taken on a ghoulish green hue.)

The Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces

Zooming out further reveals a dramatic mosaic above Putin, where the two eagle heads in Russia’s coat of arms represent the state’s religious and police powers. Rows of historical figures overlook Putin, including the founding father of the Soviet secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky, the reactionary Tsar Alexander III (whom Putin reportedly admires greatly), Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and his secret police chief, Lavrentiy Beria, and Ivan the Terrible. Also, in the righthand foreground, a Nazi service cap is visible encased in glass.

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These images refer to the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces, a Russian Patriarchal cathedral that opened in June 2020. Before the opening, leaked photos revealed a partially completed mosaic depicting Vladimir Putin and several other contemporary state officials in a celebration of the 2014 annexation of Crimea. Another piece of art featured Stalin. The Kremlin later criticized the artwork, calling such commemorations “premature,” and the mosaics were gone by the cathedral’s opening day. But the church didn’t ditch its treasure trove of Hitler memorabilia. According to Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov, the site’s archive still has several of Adolf Hitler’s personal things, including one of his Nazi uniforms and Nazi service caps (which Zhgun displays in the glass case).

Zhgun’s red-soaked depiction of the cathedral captures Orthodox Easter services in May 2021, when the building’s exterior and main temple were covered in red light. For some observers, the scene gave the cathedral a Satanic luminosity, drawing comparisons to the setting in Diablo and other hellscapes.

Online voting

Putin’s monitor then shows the wild-haired journalist Alexey Venediktov as Krusty the Clown hyping “electronic voting,” but Zhgun depicts the project as the viral illusion of a beautiful young princess who’s also a withered old woman. Zhgun first tweeted this cartoon in September 2021 to criticize online voting in Russia’s 2021 legislative elections, which Venediktov promoted as the organizer of the technical working group that helped develop the voting software. Also, as the head of Moscow’s public monitoring headquarters, Venediktov defended the online system, which election observers have described as a “black box” under the authorities’ total control.

The invasion of Ukraine

Zombie Lenin

One of the best-known Simpsons memes about Russia comes from a sketch featuring Vladimir Lenin awakening as a zombie after revelations that the USSR never really dissolved. Lenin smashes through his glass coffin and chases frightened tourists, growling that he will “crush capitalism.”

Zhgun depicts Lenin as “conceiving” of Ukraine — a reference to Putin’s assertion that the Bolsheviks invented Ukrainian statehood to appease the nationalism of ethnic minorities in the former Russian Empire. “Soviet Ukraine is the result of the Bolsheviks’ policy and can be rightfully called ‘Vladimir Lenin’s Ukraine.’ He was its creator and architect,” Putin said in a national address on February 21, 2022, when he announced Russia’s recognition of the independence of the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics.”

The Nose Dive

Next on the monitor, we see Putin piloting a jet airplane as his passengers stare helplessly. These images refer to a recurring sketch on “Calambur,” a Ukrainian comedy show that aired on Russian television in the 1990s. The sketch “The Nose Dive,” which parodied American disaster films, recycled CGI footage of a falling airplane that Zhgun mimics here. On the show, the crew’s captain is Yuri Stytskovsky’s “Commander,” who jokes maniacally about having dementia and crashing the plane. Zhgun depicts Putin in this role, piloting Russia’s disastrous foray into Ukraine.

Fantomas Unleashed

Putin’s crown briefly disappears, and he suddenly bears a striking resemblance to a certain blue-masked criminal genius: the titular character of the Fantomas trilogy directed by André Hunebelle. The second film’s title, “Fantomas Unleashed,” flashes on Putin’s monitor as a frustrated French policeman looks on, arms folded. Here, Zhgun depicts French President Emmanuel Macron as the earnest but outclassed Commissaire Juve, who can never catch Fantomas. Just days before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Macron made a concerted but doomed effort to talk down President Putin. The desperate phone call was recorded and included in a documentary later broadcast on French television.

LGBT rights

Neon pentagrams suddenly illuminate over the red military stars in Putin’s office, and fire erupts from the walls behind him. From the restroom sign on the wall to Putin’s left, the transgender symbol vanishes. The Russian authorities’ anti-LGBT policies are well-known and growing, but Zhgun here could be referring to the federal government’s explicit ban on gender transition, adopted in the summer of 2023, and to the Russian Supreme Court’s ruling in November 2023 to outlaw the so-called “international LGBT movement.”

The evolving map

The map of Ukraine first appears as Lenin’s “idea” (see above). As the video progresses, Russia’s blood-red occupation pulses in and out of Ukrainian territory, mirroring the lands held by Russia’s invasion force. A message appears over Ukraine reading, “Russia is here forever.” This is a phrase United Russia senior party member Andrey Turchak infamously uttered in May 2022 while visiting occupied Kherson. The Ukrainian military debunked Turchak’s proclamation just a few months later when it liberated the city, which Zhgun depicts as a sticky note plopped to the Ukraine map that reads, “Russia is here until November.”

Piglet Pete

As the war drags on, the adventures of a pig driving a tractor unfold on Putin’s monitor. After the first smiling pig passes through a checkpoint gate, a second pig — this one depicted as a piggy bank with a dollar sign on its side — finds the gate blocked by two guards representing Visa and MasterCard. The piggy bank then turns around and heads back. These images play on Piglet Pete, a character in children’s books by the novelist Lyudmila Petrushevskaya. In those stories, Piglet Pete’s active imagination allows him to manifest a red tractor whenever he wishes to go somewhere. The character became an online meme symbolizing emigration from Russia, immortalized in the viral song “Piglet Pete Gets the Fuck Out of Rasha.”

In Zhgun’s cartoon, Visa and MasterCard blocking the exit for emigres’ money represents the repercussions of the two financial giants’ decision to pull out of Russia over the invasion of Ukraine. The companies’ withdrawal did not deactivate Mastercard and Visa-branded cards for domestic transactions in Russia, but it did disable the cards for payments abroad, effectively forcing Russians who fled the country to rely on cash (amid a $10,000 cap on citizens traveling abroad).

Later, Putin’s monitor flashes a “mobilization” alert, which Zhgun depicts as the “Open the Gate!” meme to capture the unexpectedness of Russia’s “partial mobilization” in September 2022 and the panic of Russia’s second wave of emigration. (The “Gate” meme features two guards struggling to determine if a thing approaching their castle is good or bad.) Zhgun mixes the “Gate” meme with Piglet Pete, showing an exodus of animals during mobilization, followed by their return to Russia once mobilization is suspended.

The Death Eaters

On February 21, 2022, a few hours before he announced the recognition of the independence of Russia’s two proxies in eastern Ukraine, Putin met publicly with his National Security Council and called its members, one by one, to a podium to endorse his plans in Ukraine. The event was a bizarre and alarming piece of political theater that proved a prelude to Russia’s full-scale invasion. In the meeting, Putin deliberately humiliated his foreign intelligence chief, Sergey Naryshkin, barking at him as Naryshkin stumbled over himself while trying to recite Putin’s script for the days ahead in Ukraine.

Zhgun depicts this gathering as the scene in “Harry Potter” when the Death Eaters meet at Malfoy Manor. The skull-and-snake apparition that bathes the table in a pale green light is the Death Eaters’ Dark Mark symbol. In Zhgun’s retelling, Putin is Lord Voldemort, and Naryshkin is Lucius Malfoy, whom Voldemort debases by taking his wand and teasing him in front of the other Death Eaters. In Zhgun’s cartoon, the other Death Eaters are Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev (a notorious foreign policy hawk depicted as a smug Principal Seymour Skinner), Federation Council Chairwoman Valentina Matviyenko, National Guard Director Viktor Zolotov, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev (depicted as Springfield’s town drunk, Barney Gumble, with a bottle of booze).

Medvedev reappears later in the video as a doomsday human billboard wielding the same liquor bottle — a reference to the former president’s embrace of the apocalypse in unhinged, warmongering comments on social media that journalists at The Insider found often coincide with shipments of wine from Medvedev’s Italian vineyards.

Shaman

Before Zhgun’s camera starts to zoom back in on Putin, the patriotic singer Yaroslav Dronov, better known by his stage name Shaman, spins on the president’s desk. His shirt first bears the name of his hit song, “I’m Russian.” Shaman appears as a cardboard cutout in a nod to Alexander Gudkov’s popular parody, “I’m Narrow,” which rhymes in Russian with the title of Shaman’s original song and carries the connotations of narrowmindedness and one-dimensionality. When Shaman turns, the words on his chest change to read, “I’m not the Hitler Youth” — a reference to his July 2023 song, “My Fight,” which critics have compared to Adolf Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto, “Mein Kampf.”

Putin’s body doubles

Conspiracy theories about multiple Putins have persisted throughout the president’s long reign, motivated partly by the perceived instability in his appearance (supposedly due to surgeries and/or exotic ailments) and his extended disappearances from the public view. In September 2016, pundit Oleg Kashin added popularity to a meme that had developed over the years about the “original Putin and his six body doubles”: The Babbler, Udmurt, The Banquet, Kuchma, The Bruise, and The Diplomat. Often but not always peddled as a joke, the theory holds that each of the doubles performs certain duties for the president. In Zhgun’s video, “The Bruise” and “Kuchma” are absent, and the real Putin’s nameplate reads, “Vasilich,” which is the name political scientist and conspiracy theorist Valery Solovei assigned to the Putin double he believes visited China in October 2023.

Zelensky’s evolution

Depicted as an incarnation of Link, the hero of The Legenda of Zelda games, Ukrainian President Volodymyr “Zelya” Zelensky grows from a boy wielding a knife stamped with Soviet hammer and sickle into a bearded man armed with a sword that bears NATO’s white compass rose emblem.

Winnie-the-Pooh and ‘Zetflix’

To depict the Russian Internet’s descent into government censorship and jingoism, Zhgun shows Owl from Winnie-the-Pooh reciting the long and tedious “foreign agent” disclosure that litters much of the content now published on networks like Telegram. A tired Eeyore (whose name in Russian is “Ia-Ia” and could be interpreted as innostranyi agent, or “foreign agent”) stares blankly as his unread notifications pile up. In a satire of Russia’s regulations, Zhgun’s Owl reads the required disclosure with the character’s typical spelling errors, saying what in English might be rendered as: “Thu fallowing messige or muhterial was creeated and (or)...”

Meanwhile, the Netflix “N” logo flashes on Putin’s monitor, but it’s been turned on its side and made into a “Z.” The Latin-script letter Z is one of several symbols Russia’s military painted on the vehicles it sent into Ukraine. Within weeks of the full-scale invasion, Z became Moscow’s most recognizable pro-war propaganda motif, and it remains so to this day.

Nabiullina as Luann Van Houten (Milhouse’s mom)

In the summer of 2023, Russia’s Central Bank hiked its main interest rate by 3.5 percentage points to 12 percent in an emergency move after the ruble fell to its lowest value since early in the war with Ukraine. Zhgun depicts Russian Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina — the “top technocrat keeping Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war machine humming,” says Politico — as a dejected Luann Van Houten. She sits at the far end of Putin’s table and thinks, “God, how you fucking annoy me.” (Zhgun truncates the phrase, leaving the key obscenity unfinished, which is how it often appears as an Internet meme.)

Earlier in the video, in the top-right corner, the glass piggy bank filling with “petrodollars” briefly disappears in an apparent reference to the impact of the G7’s efforts to cap the price of Russian oil and petroleum products and reduce Moscow’s ability to finance its war on Ukraine.

Prigozhin as Grampa Simpson

Zhgun uses several different memes and cultural references to depict the Wagner Group mutiny in late June 2023. The rebellion’s leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, appears as Abraham Jebediah Simpson II, better known as Grampa Simpson, in the “Old Man Yells at Cloud” meme (originally a sight gag from season 13 of the show). On the monitor, we then see him pointing backward as snow begins to fall — an image that became an exploitable meme after Prigozhin shared a photograph in May 2023 where he gestured at a pile of killed Wagner Group fighters, blaming the Russian Defense Ministry for failing to supply his unit with the ammo it needed to capture the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut.

By now, Putin’s office chair has sprouted an asymmetric tangle of missiles, an allusion to the Iron Throne in the popular HBO series Game of Thrones. Continuing this theme, Grampa Prigozhin appears on Putin’s monitor, flanked by the reanimated corpses of Wagner Group soldiers. They all stare threateningly ahead, and the most famous euphemism from Game of Thrones is displayed on the screen: “Winter is coming.” The text then changes to “Wagner is coming.”

And then Grampa Prigozhin’s mutiny is done. He appears at Putin’s side, humbled and defeated. The monitor flashes a “Looney Tunes” spoof on the rebellion’s end, depicting Prigozhin as a hammer-wielding Elmer Fudd (referring to the group’s execution of multiple prisoners with sledgehammers) and shows Wagner cofounder Dmitry Utkin as a “skinhead” Daffy Duck, complete with Utkin’s multiple Nazi tattoos, including the SS insignia. Our final glimpse of Grampa Prigozhin shows him on a couch in his underwear, referring to a leaked photograph allegedly taken at a Belarusian military camp, where Wagner Group retreated and tried to regroup after its rebellion. The monitor quickly shows a few frames of the closing credits from the children’s comedy show “Yeralash” (including the phrase: “That’s all!”), and Prigozhin is gone for good.

Yevgeny Prigozhin died on August 23, 2023, in a suspicious plane crash that also killed Dmitry Utkin and another eight people.

By now, Putin has transformed completely into Koschei the Immortal, an archetypal villain of Russian folklore. The bones imprinted on his clothes (common in Koschei children’s costumes) form another double-headed coat of arms on his chest, and stripes run down his sleeves, evoking Slavic ethnic nationalism memes.

Russia now

Import substitution

The final setting of Putin’s office is neither the Kremlin nor the Armed Forces’ Main Cathedral but a refrigerator. Over his right shoulder, there’s a Soviet-era three-liter jug of Dobry Cola (the soft drink that replaced Coca-Cola products in Russia after the American multinational left the Russian market) and a boxed burger from Vkusno i Tochka (the fast food chain that replaced McDonald’s restaurants after the latter shut down its Russian stores). In addition to being a joke about import substitution, showing Putin “on ice” is another allusion to conspiracy theories about his supposed death.

In Zhgun’s video, a box of oranges has been sitting on the floor to Putin’s right since the early days of the war in Ukraine. In the final scene, the oranges are revealed to be Chinese imports, and the character Cheburashka emerges from the crate. (In Cheburashka’s origin story, he travels to Russia in an orange crate.) This is Zhgun’s depiction of the “Cheburnet,” a phrase Russia’s tech community coined to describe the Kremlin’s plans for total control over the Russian Internet, if not its global isolation. The Cheburnet is modeled largely on China’s Great Firewall.

Tucker Karlsson

To capture Tucker Carlson’s February 2024 visit to Moscow and controversial interview with Vladimir Putin, Zhgun plays with the American pundit’s surname and depicts him as Karlsson from the “Karlsson-on-the-Roof” children’s books by the Swedish author Astrid Lindgren, whose animated Soviet adaptations are still among the most celebrated and loved cartoons in Russia. Tucker Karlsson buzzes around Putin’s head, so lovestruck that his eyes are literally hearts.

Duntsova and Nadezhdin

Meanwhile, Putin’s monitor flashes images of the two anti-war politicians who sought to challenge him in the 2024 presidential election: Yekaterina Duntsova and Boris Nadezhdin. Neither person made the ballot: Election officials and then Russia’s Supreme Court barred them both from the race, citing dubious technicalities.

A mountain out of a molehill

The final images on Putin’s monitor show piles of feces, each with its own little fly. One of these flies then morphs into to elephant — a reference to a Russian Internet meme known as “Our Elephant,” which is used to describe someone as “on our side” (“based” in meme terms). The phrase was originally more popular in conservative circles but has since gained traction with the general public (often for ironic use). In Russia’s 2024 presidential election, opposition voters coped with their lack of genuine options by facetiously celebrating the most anti-Putin candidates available (first Nadezhdin and then New People Party candidate Vladislav Davankov) as “our elephants.” Zhgun’s cartoon also plays on the Russian aphorism for “making a mountain out of a molehill,” which in Russian is literally “to make an elephant out of a fly.”

The death of Alexey Navalny

Throughout all these events, since his arrest after returning to Moscow with his wife in January 2021, Alexey Navalny has occupied Putin’s Magic Mirror, smiling and waving with his characteristic optimism, even as Russia slides deeper into authoritarianism. In Zhgun’s story, Navalny remains “the fairest in all the land.”

Now crowned, zombie-blue, and skeletal, Putin finally turns and looks at Navalny. The president pauses, picks up his phone, puts back the receiver, and steeples his fingers once more.

The video ends here, abruptly cutting to black and implying that Vladimir Putin ordered the killing of Alexey Navalny in prison, which his associates have argued since learning of his death.

Text by Kevin Rothrock