“Russia will always be there. Geography doesn’t change. Learn to live with it.’ The most successful sentence Russian propaganda ever exported — because it arrives dressed as realism. Let us consult the actual record of eternity. The Ottoman Empire was eternal for six centuries. Austria-Hungary was a permanent fact of Europe. The British Empire covered a quarter of the planet, forever. The Soviet Union was so eternal that its collapse surprised the CIA, the Kremlin, and my grandparents in equal measure. Empires are the least permanent objects in political history — precisely because they mistake themselves for geography. Mountains are permanent. Rivers are permanent. A prison of nations held together by fear and oil revenue is a weather system. ‘Eternal Russia’ is not analysis. It is fatalism doing the empire’s homework — teaching submission and grading it as maturity. And if geography must have the last word, let it: Kyiv stood before Moscow was a clearing in the forest. Eternity has a shorter memory than empires hope.