The soldier entered the chamber nervously.
President Putin was seated on a throne fashioned from four or five living Siberian tigers, behind a desk that was made from a pair of living bears.
"Please, take a seat Grigori," he said.
The soldier glanced around the room for Grigori. There was no-one else present besides himself and the President. Gingerly, he lowered himself onto the back of the nearest sitting wolf. The animal snarled at him with clenched teeth as his buttocks settled lightly against its flank.
"Tell me, Grigori, what is the worst that can be done to a man?" enquired Putin, without lifting his head.
"I have heard stories of snails from the Chernobyl radiation zone being inserted, one at a time, into a man's anus," reported the soldier.
Behind the desk of bears, the president slowly shook his head.
"The worst that you can do to a man," he said, "is to show him what he has already lost. I am holding an American spy captive in the basement of this building. As we converse, I am screening for him the original Star Wars Trilogy, untainted by the digital meddling that plagues its current incarnation. When it is over, I will leave this man alone for some time, so he might dwell upon what has been lost and speculate on what might have been."
"Mr President, all doors to The Ukraine are locked," blurted the soldier. "Nowhere along the border can we gain entry."
One of the desk bears yawned. Putin reached over and patted the animal affectionately on the muzzle.
"Have the men been looking in all of the usual places?" he asked. "Underneath the 'No Russians Welcome' doormats, under any plant pots, or inside any conspicuously artificial-looking rocks?"
"It is not a lack of keys that is the problem," reported the soldier. "It is that the locks themselves are all jammed with toothpicks."
A wry smile formed itself among the features of the President.
"You will deliver, for me, a declaration ordering all Russian to withdraw from the Russian / Ukrainian border at once," he commanded.
"But Sir, Mr President," stammered the soldier.
Putin raised his hand, immediately silencing the boy.
"We have been bested by a Chilean fox," he announced. "If it were a Rwandan fox then events would have, no doubt, turned in our favour. Even it had been a German fox, then the outcome might still have been to our benefit. But a Chilean fox; for this there is no answer. Our mettle has been tested and we have been found wanting. Now, we must swallow the rotten potato of defeat."
"You speak of the one who they call Coach Red Pill," said the soldier. "I have read the poems in the bathroom stalls of the Kremlin - that he is a legend told to children by old grandmothers to scare them into finishing their cabbage ration; that he sucks cock for all eternity."
Putin smiled without parting his lips, as if amused by the young man's naivety.
"Do legends not also suck cock?" he enquired.
With a flourish, he spread his signature across the bottom of the declaration.
"Come, we will also eat cock," he said.
Opening a drawer in one the desk bears, he removed two steaming platters of Chicken Kiev.
Air raid sirens are blasting just outside of Gonzalo’s hotel in central Kiev
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