Not on this list: Poisoning of Litvinenko

Yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin got snippy when speaking to an invited audience about whether his country should apologize for atrosities committed under the reign of Soviet Dictator Stalin.

"Other countries have done even more terrible things," Putin said in televised remarks. "At least we've never used nuclear weapons against civilians, never poured chemicals on thousands of kilometers, or dropped seven times as many bombs as were used in [World War II] on a small country, as it was done in Vietnam, for instance."

Good point, Putie. And given your regime’s recent tendencies to roll back democracy and the rule of law in favor of that old-timey USSR-type iron fisting, I can’t blame you for going on the offensive.

For the record, and in the spirit of fair play, I present a (partial) list of very bad things definitely NOT committed by the Putin administration:

Kennedy assassination

Exxon Valdez oil spill

Rape of Nanking

Explosion of Space Shuttle Challenger

The Crimean War

Death of Apollo Creed

Russian dressing

Boris & Natasha’s persecution of moosk and squirrel

peach, cherry, and apple vodka

red dye #2

Che Guevara t-shirts

continuity errors in From Russia With Love

red tide (the phenomenon, not the film)

Red Tide (the film)

Sean Connery’s accent in Red Tide (the film)

Fur vests

the borscht belt

Yakov Smirnoff signature catch phrase “What a country!”

Cincinnati Reds

Oksana Baiul DUI

Billy Joel cover of Back in the USSR

frostbite

insipid 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics mascot

Brian De Palma’s “homage” to the Odessa Steps sequence of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin in The Untouchables

mispronunciation of “Stolichnaya”

1960s Dr. Zhivago-inspired white lipstick craze

Wolverines!

calling nosy people “buttinskis”

Zeppo Marx