Russia’s embassy in London has, perhaps unsurprisingly, been tweeting a lot about Turkey for the past couple of weeks. This morning, it sent this not even veiled threat.
Putin: Allah has punished the rulers of Turkey by depriving them of reason. They will regret what they have done. pic.twitter.com/DpSlMiR8ye
— Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) December 3, 2015
From a geopolitical perspective, this is somewhat scary. But in a more cosmic sense it is a thing of beauty. It reads like something you’d hear in a Steven Seagal movie: “Allah has punished the rulers of Turkey by depriving them of reason.” *roundhouse kick* “They will regret what they have done.” *haymaker* The picture, a washed out photograph of a television screen, is phenomenal—the proverbial cherry on top. Putin controls his image very carefully and he rarely looks this terrible, or unthreatening. He looks like a brook trout in a suit.
But the Russian embassy doesn’t just tweet threatening messages about foreign policy with funny photographs. It begins nearly every day with a photograph of a nature scene from Russia. Here’s what it tweeted an hour before telling Turkey that it has run afoul of god:
Good morning! (location: Samara)@MID_SAMARA pic.twitter.com/ifTIbrBjDs
— Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) December 3, 2015
And sometimes, the stars align—the rare threatening foreign policy tweet that is also a nature tweet:
.@RT_Erdogan put family members in lucrative posts in energy firms,plus graphic evidence of IS oil trade thru Turkey pic.twitter.com/Lj8srt6ad1
— Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) December 2, 2015