Every international meeting of the minds requires one thing: chairs.
While this may seem like a simple request, the rich and powerful among us are (understandably) incredibly paranoid people. Getting a chair, then, becomes an unnerving task. The chair might be rigged with explosives. Some dude with COVID could have coughed all over the chair. Or, more likely, the opulent diets of the rich may cause a weaker chair to topple beneath their weight.
Usually, all of these paranoid dealings are done out of view of the observing public. This, however, wasn’t the case during a recent meeting between Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un.
In a video posted by The Sun, you can see a guy really giving Kim’s chair his all, going over it with a disinfecting cloth and examining its every nook and cranny. The reason he’s doing this, The Sun claims, is that he wants to ensure there’s no poison on the chair.
Honestly, I didn’t know you could poison someone via chair. That said, I’m not the only one who was surprised by the attention given to the seemingly innocuous seat. “The chair turned out to be the subject of the greatest concern of the North Korean side,” wrote Kommersant’s Kremlin correspondent, Andrei Kolesnikov, per Reuters.
The best part? Per Kommersant, this wasn’t even the first chair they tried to give Kim. “Apparently Kim's security detail — of over 100 people — were unhappy with the first chair and another one — exactly the same — was produced by the Russian side,” the Reuters article reads.
The video also purports to show the security detail checking to see if the chair could handle Kim’s weight — which, c’mon guys, at least do that out of frame.
All this said, the heightened paranoia makes sense, as it’s pretty important that this meeting goes over well. According to WYMT, the trip is being made to determine whether North Korea could supply ammunition to Russia, and Kim’s got a lot of stuff to look forward to as they negotiate this potential deal. “Putin told Russian state TV after the summit that Kim would visit an aircraft plant in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, and then go to Vladivostok to view Russia’s Pacific Fleet, a university and other facilities.”
What more could you ask for in a Russian vacation? Better yet — at least for Kim’s security detail — none of that involves much sitting.
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