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

**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.