On Saturday, as shell-shocked Iranians pondered Donald Trump’s generous bombing of their country, Dmitry Medvedev delivered a characteristically abrasive assessment of the situation on English-language social media.

“The peacekeeper is at it again,” Russia’s former prime minister, who served as president during a silly interregnum separating Vladimir Putin’s first decade in power from his second (and counting), sneered, of Trump’s attack on Iran.

“The [nuclear negotiations] were just a cover,” Medvedev went on, before asking, rhetorically, “who has more patience to wait for the enemy’s sorry end,” the US, which “is just 249 years old” or the “Persian Empire which was founded over 2,500 years ago?”

Suffice to say Dmitry’s got jokes. And the fact that both of his jokes on Saturday — the juxtaposition between Trump’s peacekeeper pretensions and his near constant warmongering, and the allusion to American empire as relatively short-lived — were almost verbatim from the dark humor I employed in “Commencing ‘Operation Epic Fury‘” and “Some Empire,” speaks to the training I received during a brief stint as an unwitting peddler of Kremlin-friendly, geopolitical agitprop.

The jokes — the “Whataboutism” — are all and always, the same. And America has only itself to blame for being so susceptible to those jokes.

US foreign policy’s an easy target for skilled propagandists, and I gotta tell you: It doesn’t take long if you’re operating from inside the echo chamber to forget who the “good” guys are. (I remember saying, in 2015, that if she were single, I’d date Maria Zakharova. She was 39 then, so before you make fun of me, make allowances for what 11 years does to us in the physical appearance department during middle age.)

In a lot of cases, the likes of Zakharova, her handler Sergei Lavrov and Medvedev who, it should be noted, used to be a moderate before he morphed into one of Putin’s most enthusiastically militant sycophants, are right about the many bloody hypocrisies of US foreign policy.

But — and I can never emphasize this enough — the only safe way to consume Russian propaganda is to do so understanding that it everywhere and always relies on non sequiturs.

For example, it might seem as though “What about the Iraq War?” is eminently relevant to the Ukraine discussion, but is it? No. Not at all. The two have nothing whatever to do which each other. In no way, shape or form does George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 excuse Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine nearly two decades later.

You’re going to hear a lot of Whataboutism (with all the associated non sequiturs) from Russia in the days, weeks and months ahead. But what you won’t hear is any admission from the Kremlin that some of the blame for the (likely) fall of the theocracy in Tehran lies with Putin. The same can be said for the fall of the Assad regime in Syria and, to a lesser but still material extent, Nicolas Maduro’s capture in Caracas.

Putin’s grand folly left the Kremlin’s client states exposed. A big part of the problem stems from the fact that out-and-out dictators almost never receive reliable military advice from their generals, because the top military brass is scared of being purged or killed. No one seems to have told Putin in 2022 that his designs on seizing Kyiv within days of launching his “special military operation” might be wildly unrealistic.

At the very least, we can say it didn’t occur to Putin at the ouset that he might end up with substantially all of Russia’s military assets tied up in Ukraine for half a decade, leaving the Kremlin with virtually no capacity to project power elsewhere in the world. (It didn’t help that the hot dog vendor-turned warlord who ran Putin’s private expeditionary force tried to mount a coup and had to be killed.)

The probable demise of Khamenei’s regime in Tehran is directly traceable to two men’s delusions of grandeur. One of those men is (or was) Yahya Sinwar. The other’s Putin.

There’s still no expert consensus on what Sinwar hoped to achieve, or what he believed was possible regarding the degradation of the Israeli state, following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks. But to the extent he cared about preserving the militarized Shia network which aided and abetted the Sunni extremist operation to which he dedicated his life, he should’ve factored in a hamstrung Russia before launching Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.

With the caveat that everything’s clear in hindsight, the risk of a domino effect shouldn’t have escaped someone with the strategic planning capacity of a Yahya Sinwar. In massacring and kidnapping Israeli civilians, he wasn’t just giving the most ardently right-wing Israeli government in history carte blanche to commit genocide in Gaza (an outcome Sinwar was on the record calling acceptable), he was also affording that same Israeli government an excuse to take the gloves off against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

What the IDF and Mossad knew, but no one else did, was that in a gloves-off scenario, Hezbollah could be downgraded from the world’s most militarily-capable, non-state actor to little more than a second-rate militia in no time flat.

If you’d told a CIA analyst whose remit was Hezbollah in June of 2024 that within four months, Fuad Shukr, Ibrahim Aqil, Hashem Safieddine and Hassan Nasrallah himself would all be dead, that analyst would’ve been skeptical, to put it mildly.

Hezbollah’s fast-motion decimation marked a renewal of the existential crisis for Bashar al-Assad, whose regime only survived a decade-long civil war because Hezbollah, at the behest of the Quds and with Russian airpower, intervened heavily beginning in 2015 to beat back the nightmarish hodgepodge of Sunni jihadists competing to topple the government.

One of those jihadist groups was the Nusra Front, al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise. Thanks to Hezbollah and, again, the Russian air force, the Nusra Front was defeated and banished to Idlib, where they rebranded themselves Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and administered a kind of statelet under the de facto protection of the Turkish army.

The fact that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham launched its lightning offensive to seize power in Damascus just two months after the demise of Nasrallah and Safieddine in Beirut, plainly suggests Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, Syria’s Trump-friendly “president,” knew it was over for Assad the minute Hezbollah lost its leaders. Russia was for all intents and purposes gone from Syria and suddenly, Hezbollah was defunct.

That Jolani — who’s Ahmed al-Sharaa when he’s in a suit getting baptized by Trump-branded cologne in the Oval Office — was able to recapture Aleppo, Hama and Homs in a matter of days in December of 2024, speaks to the complete absence of Hezbollah ground support and Russian air power which restored Assad’s grip on Syria eight years earlier.

Simply put: Jolani saddled up in Idlib, waltzed into Aleppo virtually unchallenged, then drove a ramshackle convoy straight down the highway to Damascus, reversing everything Hezbollah and Russia accomplished for Assad over two years in 2015 and 2016 in a matter of two weeks in 2024. That wouldn’t have been conceivable, let alone practicable, were Hezbollah still operational and Russia unencumbered.

Fast forward a year, and another Russian client state (albeit one not as dear to the Kremlin as Syria) was on the ropes, as Trump effectuated a naval blockade off the coast of Venezuela. There, Putin’s options were limited, but it’s probably fair to say that had he not been so consumed with Ukraine, he could’ve at least asked Maduro if the S-300s were plugged in (they weren’t), and if not, offered to help get them operational. You know, just in case Delta Force showed up in the middle of the night.

Now, a little over a year after Assad’s ouster and a mere eight weeks since Maduro’s abduction, Putin’s about to lose Iran. On Saturday, Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said — and this is undeniably funny in a macabre way — that Khamenei and Masoud Pezeshkian “are still alive as far as I know.”

The rest of his remarks were replete with the usual defiant bombast, but that quote doesn’t telegraph a lot of confidence in the regime’s prospects. It’s entirely likely that Khamenei will be killed within weeks, if not days, if Putin can’t figure a way to ferry him out of Tehran like he did Assad in Damascus.

This is nothing short of humiliating for Russia. If (when) Khamenei’s dead or gone (or dead and gone) Putin will have lost all his non-local clients in the short space of 15 months.

I hope it was worth it for — checks notes — 20% of Ukraine’s territory, most of which Putin already controlled anyway through separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk.

Coming full circle, the rhetoric out of the Kremlin in the days ahead is going to be scathing. In some cases, the criticism of US foreign policy will come across as apt, deserved and even funny. But make no mistake, the joke’s on Russia here.