The first problem was that there were barely any Nazis to be found, despite around 190,000 very well-armed men sent looking for them. The second is that Russia — having snipped bits of land off of various neighbors, including Ukraine in 2014 and Georgia in 2008, then going on an ethnic-cleansing spree — looked a lot more like Nazis than most anyone in Ukraine did.

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Besides, when your objective is really to get rid of Nazis, you don’t order a half-assed “special military operation.” You go in fully mobilized and ready to kick Nazi heinie all the way back to the Vistula.

So when the denazify thing didn’t pan out, the new reason given was that Ukraine was running deadly biolabs. Or maybe the CIA was running them on Ukrainian soil at the behest of Nazi Masonic Jews or something. Honestly, even my receipt-gathering superpowers proved unequal to the task of following all the conspiracy theory action, some of it in my own comments section.

That aside, I guess we were supposed to believe that the best thing to do when there are dangerous biolabs next door is to blow up a bunch of stuff around where they might be.

If Ukraine had had bioweapons handy, they almost certainly would have used them during the desperate days when it appeared Putin’s ill-fated siege of Kyiv might just work.

But instead of biolabs, mostly what Russian soldiers found was washing machines and other major appliances, quickly patriated to the Motherland, maybe for denazification.

For a brief while there earlier this month, Moscow’s excuse du jour was that Ukraine was working on a dirty bomb.

At a time when Kyiv is successfully committing its comparatively scarce resources to pushing Russian forces out of Kharkiv and now out of Kherson in the south and points east as well…

…they’d spend time, money, and material building a dirty bomb that would contaminate their own homeland for years?

That’s like having a kitchen fire, getting it put out with a fire extinguisher, but then peeing on the cooktop for good measure.

Also for our VIPs: Let’s Call Putin’s Ukraine War What It Really Is

Nobody bought Russia’s dirty bomb Big Lie, which is I guess why they seem to have dropped it — at least for now. There are indications, as yet unproven, that Moscow might be planning a dirty bomb trick of their own at the massive Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, captured by Russian troops in March.

Whatever is or isn’t going on at Zaporizhzhia, it would have to be the most dangerous and ridiculous nuclear-powered Stupid Human Trick ever to top the latest lame excuse-mongering from Moscow.

Are you ready for this? Seriously, I need you to be sitting down.

Here it is: TASS just reported that Russia’s Security Council pledged to “desatanize” Ukraine.

TASS just reported that Russia’s Security Council pledged to “desatanize” Ukraine. The “desatanization” of Ukraine is becoming increasingly urgent, said Alexei Pavlov, deputy secretary of Russia’s Security Council, because “hundreds of sects” are now operating in Ukraine.

— Ruslan Trad (@ruslantrad) October 25, 2022

My first thought might have been the same as yours: “A Reddit and a tweet? C’mon, how unreliable are your sources, anyway?”

But it’s legit.

TASS hasn’t released the story on their English-language site and, if I were them, I never would.

But here’s the link to the Russian-language story: В аппарате Совбеза РФ считают все более насущным проведение “десатанизации” Украины.

According to Google Translate and a whole lot of military and foreign affairs experts I follow, the English is: “The apparatus of the Security Council of the Russian Federation considers it increasingly urgent to carry out ‘desatanization’ of Ukraine.”

Satan, begone! Putin’s Ukraine War isn’t an invasion — it’s an exorcism with tanks and artillery.