Why jolly face of Putin's killing machine in UK has even more to laugh about

Born in 1957, Kelin studied at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations and, on leaving in 1979, joined the diplomatic service at a time when Cold War warrior Leonid Brezhnev was running the Soviet Union. This is a man who was, quite literally, schooled in undemocratic power.

Nowadays, he appears to be fond of giving interviews to British journalists in which he is quick to smile, in between periods when he deploys his ‘serious face’ as he tells bare-faced lies about the war in Ukraine.

He is also prone to chuckling for no apparent reason, as seen at the end of an interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday, when Russian missile strikes on the Ukrainian city of Sumy killed 35 people, including children, and injured more than 110.

A special kind of lie

I too sometimes laugh inappropriately during awkward situations. It’s not necessarily that there’s anything funny, just that the situation is bizarre. The only way I can understand Kelin’s laugh is that he knows he’s telling a pack of lies, he knows that his interviewers know and this is what he finds amusing.

In Russian, there is actually a word for such lies: vranyo. A Reddit user’s definition of this word was cited by a Russian studies professor in an article for The Conversation website to help explain its meaning: “You know I’m lying, and I know that you know, and you know that I know that you know, but I go ahead with a straight face, and you nod seriously and take notes.”

Kelin’s problem is that he can’t quite keep that straight face. Hence, the man who is the face of Putin’s blood-soaked, murderous, warmongering regime in the UK is also ‘Mr Chuckles’. I wonder if he cries himself to sleep at night.

Looking into Kelin’s soul

Living in the UK, a country where elections result in the peaceful transfer of power and where opposition politicians are not locked up, poisoned or murdered, he may have an idea that his political master is evil, but feel trapped in his job.

However, it’s equally possible that Kelin fully supports the death and destruction Putin has unleashed on Ukraine in the name of rebuilding the Soviet Empire that they both once served. I am unable to look into Kelin’s soul, assuming he still has one.

His lies include that the Ukraine war was started by Kyiv, not Moscow, and that Russia faced a threat from Nato. “This for us is a question of survival of our sovereignty. Whether we keep our sovereignty or we will be subordinated to the Western desires and the Western interests,” he told Kuenssberg.

Until Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January, these lies did not really matter. They could be filed alongside the long string of false claims that has been emanating from the Kremlin and its associated outlets for years.

Sumy slaughter a ‘mistake’, says Trump

However, the US President has now, once again, decided to follow the Kremlin line and blame Volodymyr Zelensky – the democratically elected President of Ukraine who Trump falsely claimed was a “dictator” – for starting the war.

“You don't start a war against someone 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles," he told journalists in the White House.

Asked about the Sumy attack, Trump said it was “terrible” but then added he had been “told they [the Russians] made a mistake". Mistakes happen in war, so if it really was started by Zelensky then, following Trump’s logic, the Ukrainian President is to blame.

This is the nightmarish, Orwellian distortion of reality that Putin and Trump are both engaging in, trying to persuade enough people that a country which was invaded and has been defending itself valiantly is actually the aggressor. It is patently not true and everyone knows it’s not true, but still they are saying it.

There was uproar in the West when Trump first claimed Zelensky was a dictator and Ukraine started the war. The repetition of these remarks has not been met by a similarly forceful response. We are all getting used to the ‘vranyo’, which, of course, is part of the strategy. A lie that’s repeated so often that people stop contesting it in a meaningful way can gradually slip towards acceptance.

Trapped into echoing Trump’s lies

Instead, the Labour government appears focussed on getting a US-UK trade deal, in the hope of persuading Trump to remove tariffs on British goods for the sake of our economy. And the terms of a deal that Trump will sign will almost certainly be more favourable to the US than the UK.

Keir Starmer and other governments appear to have stopped treating Trump as a human being who can be held to standards of honesty and decency, and more like a force of nature that cannot be reasoned with but must be managed.

This may be sensible realpolitik, given the economic might at Trump’s disposal, but it is not moral. We are bending to the will of the world’s biggest bully and, if we continue down that road, we may find ourselves almost trapped into echoing Trump’s lies.

Perhaps Kelin would sympathise, but I suspect that, as he thinks about how the West is being manipulated and corrupted, his laughter will only increase and become ever more maniacal.