“Fellas, is it possible that [disastrous historical event] was actually a conspiracy caused by [this week’s villainous country]?”
On September 9, 2001, Russian President Vladimir Putin called his American counterpart George W. Bush with an urgent message: Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of the anti-Taliban and Moscow-supported Northern Alliance, had been assassinated in Afghanistan by two suicide bombers posing as journalists. Putin warned Bush of “a foreboding that something was about to happen, something long in preparation.” Two days later al-Qaida struck the United States.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-impact-of-september-11-on-us-russian-relations/
Informed by his staff that a Russian satellite had just observed a missile being fired from a Navy ship off the coast of Washington at the Pentagon, the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, tried to contact his US counterpart. He was unable to do so. Not because the telephone networks had broken down, but because George W. Bush was temporarily no longer president.
