The leaders of Finland and Norway spent 90 minutes on the phone with Vladimir Putin on Tuesday to talk about peace. By dinner they had achieved it, everywhere except Russia, Ukraine and Scandinavia.
I've covered a lot of peace initiatives. This is the first one that started a war at the Nordic Council.
Here's what's real, per the BBC and Euronews. Finnish President Alexander Stubb and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre placed the call from Helsinki. It was the first direct contact between a European leader and Putin since Emmanuel Macron's call in July 2025. Stubb called it "frank and substantive." Støre said there were "big differences in views." Neither suggested the war had moved an inch.
Putin, according to the Kremlin, explained that peace is possible only if Russia's "legal interests" are taken into account "fully and unconditionally." He also walked them through the "root causes" of the war, which in Kremlin dialect means Ukraine having the nerve to exist.
So two heads of state got an hour and a half of the most powerful man in Moscow, and what they brought home was the same speech he's been giving since 2022. That's not diplomacy. That's a timeshare presentation.
The real fireworks came after they hung up. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said she was "very sceptical" of the call and that it was "not coordinated with any of us." Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said he had "pretty low expectations." All four leaders were in Helsinki at the same time, for the same meeting, about Nordic cooperation.
Let that sit. Four Scandinavian leaders, one building, one agenda item called "working together," and two of them still talked about the phone call like they'd found out your brother-in-law borrowed the truck.
Støre's defense was the most honest sentence said in Europe all week. He said the EU has not had a common message or a common approach in four years. He's not wrong. Brussels has spent the war issuing joint statements about the importance of joint statements.
On the sewer scale, I give this whole production three rats out of five. One rat for calling Putin to hear a speech you could have read on the Kremlin website. One rat for Denmark and Sweden treating a phone call like a breach of the group chat. And one rat for Europe, which spent four years refusing to talk to Moscow and is now furious that somebody else did it first.
Putin gets no rats. He took a 90-minute call, gave away nothing, and watched four of the most polite countries on Earth start arguing with each other before the tea got cold. That's the cheapest win the Kremlin has had all year, and they didn't even pay for the call.
Everyone agreed to keep talking, according to the BBC. Everyone except the Nordic Council, which may need a moderator.
And here's your bill: regular gas averaged $4.27 a gallon on Oct. 27, per AAA, up from $3.05 a year ago, and nobody in Helsinki put that on the agenda either.
This article is satire. The Demorat is a parody news site; real facts are drawn from the linked sources, and jokes, invented scenes, and fictional characters are not real.
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