This Week in Regional Absurdity: Dead Veterinarians, Grounded Conscripts, and Other Fun

Good morning from Warsaw, where the coffee is strong and the news is stronger. This week gave us a veterinary official found dead after overseeing a mass cattle cull, Belarus suddenly discovering it has a conscience about military transits, and Germany's new chancellor learning that you cannot downplay a row with Donald Trump any more than you can whisper at a heavy metal concert.

Let me walk you through the five moments this week when reality looked at satire and said, "Hold my vodka."

**Item One: The Veterinary Official Who Knew Too Much (About Cows)**

Sergei Tur, who headed Novosibirsk's regional veterinary department for animal disease control, has been found dead. Tur was reportedly responsible for organizing quarantines and the mass culling of cattle in recent operations. The timing, as they say in the business, is interesting.

Now, I am not suggesting anything. I am simply noting that in a region where falling out of windows has become a recognized occupational hazard for anyone involved in controversial government programs, being the face of a mass cattle cull seems like the kind of résumé line that ages poorly. The official cause of death has not been released, which in itself tells you everything you need to know about how much official causes of death mean anymore.

The punchline writes itself: in modern Russia, even the veterinarians are not safe. I used to joke that you needed to avoid careers in journalism, opposition politics, and military logistics. Add livestock management to the list. At this rate, the only safe job left will be writing Putin's speeches, and even that comes with the risk of accidentally making him sound mortal.

**Item Two: Belarus Discovers It Has Borders (Selectively)**

Belarus has closed a transit route for Russian military conscripts, according to rights lawyers who reported that a Russian man listed in a military conscription database was barred from flying out of Minsk National Airport earlier this week. This marks a fascinating evolution in Belarusian policy, which until now could best be described as "whatever Moscow says, plus 10 percent."

Let me get this straight: Belarus, which has allowed Russian forces to use its territory as a staging ground, which has permitted missile launches from its soil, which has essentially outsourced its foreign policy to a filing cabinet in the Kremlin, has suddenly developed concerns about military conscripts transiting through its airport. This is like your most enabling friend suddenly refusing to hold your beer because they are worried about contributing to alcoholism.

The timing is exquisite. Belarus closes this particular route just as other reports suggest Russia is struggling to meet recruitment targets without resorting to methods that look bad on CNN. So now Lukashenko gets to play the reasonable neighbor while simultaneously hosting enough Russian military hardware to qualify as a branch office of the Ministry of Defense.

The lesson: sovereignty is not dead in Belarus. It is just extremely selective and activated only when it provides plausible deniability.

**Item Three: Perm Region Discovers New Shade of Black**

The skies turned black over the Perm region after Ukraine reportedly struck an oil pipeline facility. Unverified reports in Ukrainian media suggested that a Transneft oil pumping station was targeted in the morning attack. The smoke was visible from neighboring districts, which is the kind of infrastructure damage that is hard to spin as a controlled burn.

What strikes me about this story is not the attack itself—cross-border strikes on energy infrastructure have become so routine they barely qualify as news anymore. What strikes me is the phrase "skies turn black," as if the Perm region's environmental situation needed any help looking apocalyptic. This is an area where the air quality on a good day makes Beijing look like a Swiss alpine resort.

The real comedy here is watching Russian officials explain why a critical piece of energy infrastructure was apparently defended by nothing more than hope and a strongly worded memo. Air defense systems cost money, and money has been allocated to other priorities, like yachts that can outrun sanctions and palace renovations that definitely are not palaces if you ask the right way.

I am old enough to remember when striking oil infrastructure deep inside a country was considered an escalation. Now it is a Wednesday. The normalization curve on this conflict has gone vertical.

**Item Four: Germany's Merz Tries to Un-Ring a Bell**

Germany's new Chancellor Friedrich Merz attempted to downplay a recent row with Donald Trump, trying to steady transatlantic ties following a public spat over the Iran war. This is a bit like trying to downplay a bar fight by insisting you were simply engaged in aggressive networking.

Merz is learning what every European leader eventually learns: you cannot manage Donald Trump with traditional diplomacy any more than you can herd cats with a PowerPoint presentation. Trump does not do private disagreements. He does not do quiet corrections. He does public theater, and if you step into the ring with him, you are part of the show whether you planned to be or not.

The Iran war dimension adds a special flavor to this. Europe has spent decades building a foreign policy framework based on multilateral consensus and carefully worded joint statements. Trump's approach to Iran can best be described as "maximum pressure plus whatever I thought of in the shower this morning." Merz is now caught between a German public that does not want another Middle East adventure and an American president who treats alliance commitments like terms of service agreements—technically binding but who actually reads those?

The punchline: Merz will spend the next three months downplaying things, and Trump will spend the next three months making sure there are new things to downplay. It is a perpetual motion machine of transatlantic awkwardness.

**Item Five: London's Resilience Gets Tested, Again**

Two Jewish men were stabbed in north London in what Mayor Sadiq Khan called an "appalling attack." Police made an arrest. The incident adds to a growing list of religiously motivated attacks across European capitals that officials keep describing with words like "appalling" and "unacceptable," as if strongly worded adjectives have ever stopped anyone from doing appalling, unacceptable things.

I am not making light of violence. I am making light of the response, which has become so formulaic you could generate it with a bot. Insert [minority group], insert [type of attack], insert [mayor's statement of solidarity], insert [promise of investigation], wait three weeks, repeat.

London has spent years building a reputation as a multicultural success story, a city where diversity is strength and tolerance is non-negotiable. That reputation is being tested by people who apparently did not get the memo. And the official response—more police patrols, more community outreach, more interfaith dialogues—feels increasingly like bringing a butter knife to a gunfight.

The lesson: you cannot community-outreach your way out of radicalization, but you also cannot security-state your way into safety. So we are stuck in this exhausting middle ground where attacks happen, arrests are made, statements are issued, and everyone waits for the next one.

**The Week in Review**

So there you have it: a veterinary official who learned that knowing where the bodies (of cattle) are buried can be hazardous to your health, Belarus discovering it has principles precisely when it is convenient, Russian air defense taking another day off, Germany's chancellor trying to walk back a fight that was live-streamed to 80 million people, and London adding another entry to its growing list of things we thought we had moved past but apparently have not.

The absurdity is not that these things happened. The absurdity is that we are no longer surprised when they do. Somewhere along the way, we normalized the insane, and now we are just counting the days until the next item appears that makes us say, "Well, that tracks."

Next week will almost certainly be worse. It always is. But at least we will have better material.