PUTIN Reportedly DEAD

(Queens, NY) Ukranian neighborhoods here are abuzz with rumors that Vladimir Putin is dead. Celebrations circulate the summer concrete heralding the blessed event. Plots drift from a vile of Cossack poison to a small Stalin-era detention device planted carefully amid his flowing boxers. 

“Boom!” gestures a chubby Slavic shopkeeper smiling. “Boom!”

Some say he is already scoped out his resting place somewhere in the vast expanse of Siberia, next to Peter the Great and his beloved Russian chihuahua, Mao. Meanwhile happy funeral goers appear to be enjoying the exchanges of information, true or not.

Others say he stumbled on slippery 16th century Czarist tiles or fell off his secret, high-security throne. More creative accounts hold that he was repeatedly dunked in his bathwater by a swarthy Taliban assassin “until he drowned like a rat”. 

This photo, reputedly smuggled out of Russia shows funeral of bigwig thought to be our friend Vladimir Putin.

Insiders insist he has been dead since early 2016.

“They have several autocratic guys who look like Putin, dress like Putin,” said a refugee from Crimea. “Think about it–Many of them look like Putin–White, bvalding, paranoid…Did I mention White?”

 “Even his reputed girlfriend couldn’t tell the difference,” cackled one woman from her perch at a local bar.

She further contends that Soviet-like invasions have gone poorly because Russian munitions factories are cranking out foolish Cardboard cutouts of Russian leader instead of bullets.

“Putin was never top gun anyway.” says my golfing buddy, a serious student of living history.

He says if Putin had really been the Man he’d have been snuffed out by other mafia figures unhappy with his early  performance in Ukraine. 

These claims have been heatedly disputed by the Kremlin and locally by history department heads at Jerry Lewis University in Durango. 

-Kashmir Horseshoe