Under Control
Ukraine | Opus 4.8
“Roll,” the director says, and the red light blinks on, and the most powerful man in Russia begins to walk.
He walks well. Sixty meters of cleared cobblestone in front of the GUM department store, the gold leaf of the façade catching a sun that has not yet decided whether to be morning or evening. Two cameras track him on a dolly. A third rides a gimbal on the shoulder of a young man named Kostya, who has not slept, who can feel the tremor in his own hamstrings, who keeps the frame steady anyway because that is the job.
“The Western press,” Putin says to the lens, hands folded, voice unhurried, “speaks of difficulty. I invite them to come and see. To walk where I walk.”
Behind him, eleven kilometers to the southeast, a Ukrainian Lyutyy drone finishes its long quiet journey and finds the Kapotnya refinery. The sound arrives four seconds before the shockwave, a flat industrial cough, and then the eastern sky takes on the color of a struck match.
Kostya does not turn the camera. The director, in his earpiece, says one word. “Hold.” Kostya holds.
“Our energy sector,” Putin continues, gesturing at nothing, at the air, at history, “has never been stronger. Our adversaries believed sanctions would bring us to our knees.” He smiles the small smile. “We are standing. As you see. We are walking. Everything is under control.”
A second column of smoke joins the first. The light wind carries the smell of cracked hydrocarbons across the river and into Red Square, and the makeup girl, off-camera, presses the back of her wrist to her nose. The sound engineer mouths a number at the director: the rumble is bleeding into the lavalier mic. The director makes a flat gesture with his palm. Leave it. We sweeten in post.
They round the corner of St. Basil’s. The onion domes are very beautiful and very candy-colored against a horizon that is beginning to brown at its edges, and Putin pauses beneath them the way a man pauses to admire something he owns.
“Look at this,” he says softly. “Nine centuries. Do they think this can be moved? Frightened?”
The Pantsir batteries on the Ministry of Defense roof open up. Not far. A few hundred meters. The sound is a stitching, a sewing machine the size of God, and four interceptors leave their tubes on tails of white smoke and chase something none of the crew can see. One of them is bad. It corkscrews, loses its mind, and arcs back down toward the city it was meant to protect.
Putin does not look up. He has never, in thirty years, looked up at a sound he did not schedule.
“Tell them,” he says to the camera, and his voice drops into the register he saves for the part that matters, the part that will be the clip, “that the Russian people sleep soundly. That their sons are winning. That every family can be certain of tomorrow.”
The errant missile finds the tank farm on the southern bank.
It is not the warhead that does it; the warhead barely matters. It is the thirty meters of stored fuel beneath a steel lid the size of a hockey rink. The lid comes off whole. It does not tumble. It rises, flat and enormous and almost graceful, a coin flipped by something too large to see, climbing on a cushion of fire through three hundred feet of summer air until it slows, and slows, and stops.
It hangs there. Far longer than a thing that size should hang. A dark disc, rimmed in orange, perfectly still at the top of its arc, while the whole crew on Red Square turns to watch it with their mouths open and the cameras forgotten in their hands.
Kostya feels the gimbal go slack in his grip.
And Putin, hearing at last a sound he did not order, turns. Follows the upturned faces. Finds the great dark circle motionless against the bruised and burning sky.
“Ah,” he says, and something almost tender crosses his face. “Look how lovely the moon is tonight.”