Europe

London burned like it was 1944 again.

At 7:00 p.m., just as the curtains had risen at the opera house for Carmen, a massive explosion shattered the performance and engulfed the hall in a firestorm. What had been a monument of art was reduced to scorched ruin. A brilliant flash, brighter than the fire and louder than thunder, lit up London's grey skies.

Simultaneously, a second attack struck at the city's heart: the London Underground. During the rush hour surge, an IRA suicide bomber detonated near a central platform. The shockwave obliterated the station's structural supports. The ceiling caved in, entombing commuters beneath concrete and dust. Streets above choked with ash and confusion, where dazed survivors emerged from the depths screaming, stumbling, and smeared in blood.

Within minutes, the sky howled with sirens. Fire engines raced through traffic-clogged avenues. Onlookers sobbed before news cameras. Three hours later, a video arrived at major media outlets: masked men from the IRA claimed responsibility, warning that this was only the beginning. "We have enough explosives to turn all of Britain into a land of blood and bone," one declared coldly.

But London wasn't alone.

That same evening in Paris, four gunmen armed with Kalashnikov rifles crashed a vehicle into the front steps of the Opéra Garnier. Security was outgunned and outnumbered. The gunmen stormed the grand hall where a soirée of Europe's elite had gathered. The massacre was swift and methodical. Flames roared. Screams rose. And high society fell under a hail of bullets.

Men in tuxedos and women in gowns were shredded in seconds. Blood sprayed the velvet walls. In under three minutes, the main hall was a killing field. These men were not indiscriminate—they had names. Among the dead were five prominent businessmen who had been quietly funneling money to Chechen militants through Western intelligence networks.

The Serbian commandos had one job: make a statement. When the shooting ceased, they executed the wounded with cold efficiency. Then, shouting "Živela Srbija!" they exited and engaged French police in a gun battle that ended only when GIGN snipers killed them.

The press dubbed it the Paris Massacre. Over a hundred civilians dead. Dozens injured. A second videotape arrived hours later:

"NATO beasts—this is our gift to you. You bombed Serbian cities. You killed Serbian children. Now we answer with iron and blood. This is only the beginning. Until you withdraw from our war, our war will come to you."

In response, Paris declared a full curfew and raised national alert levels to the highest since the foundation of the Fifth Republic.

Hours later, Serbian and Bosnian Serb officials scrambled to distance themselves. They claimed no knowledge of the group. "A spontaneous act of nationalist extremists," they insisted. No one believed them.

Meanwhile, chaos engulfed London. Scotland Yard received hundreds of bomb threats. Police were authorized to detain anyone on mere suspicion. The Prime Minister appeared haggard in his address, calling this "the darkest week in London's postwar history."

The chief of MI6 resigned. After all, this was a catastrophic failure. Just a week prior, British intelligence had celebrated the Beslan incident as a victory against the Kremlin. Now, London was choking on its own blood.

As Britain and France thundered their condemnation, the Moscow press ran a different tune. When the British Prime Minister saw the Soviet headlines in his office, he hurled a coffee mug across the room.

"These bastards are worse than dictators," he screamed. "Liberal my ass!"

The Moscow Daily, bearing Yanayev's personal byline, read:

"This is not terrorism. This is a domestic crisis. Let us not vilify the brave Irish people. We must understand the roots of this tragedy. The British state has birthed a society so cold, so cruel, that its own citizens are driven to self-immolation in protest. These attacks are not the cause, but the consequence. The British system is the real criminal."

"Why do they strike? Because they are unheard. Because their rights, their beliefs, their humanity have been trampled. If you wish to prevent bloodshed, then dismantle the structures of oppression. End the anti-human regime."

"Freedom lies not in punishing the people, but in uplifting them. 'The people should not be afraid of the government; the government should be afraid of the people.'"

International observers thought Moscow had published the wrong script.

But this wasn't a mistake. It was precision retaliation—mirroring the exact language the UK used just a week earlier to vilify Russia after Beslan. Now, the same rhetoric was aimed westward. It was a masterstroke in psychological warfare.

And as Yanayev watched the West squirm under its own moral hypocrisy, he issued an official Soviet demand:

"We urge Britain and France to seriously address the state of human rights within their own borders."

This, more than bullets or bombs, struck deepest.

The war for narrative had begun—and Yanayev, bloody but unbowed, was already rewriting the rules.

At that moment, both London and Paris had only one shared thought racing through the minds of their government propaganda departments:

The combat effectiveness of the Soviet propaganda machine was monstrous.

Newsrooms buzzed with disbelief. Diplomats whispered about narrative collapse. Even Third World nations, long used to watching from the sidelines, began to joke:

"It seems the five permanent members of the UN got their scripts mixed up this year."

In Moscow, Yanaev sat before a glowing television screen, the blue light flickering across his face. News anchors across the globe broadcast scenes of chaos in London and blood in Paris, while Soviet analysts coolly deconstructed the "failures of liberal governance."Yanaev allowed himself the rare indulgence of a smile.

For the first time, the fire had spread there—to the sanctified cities of the "free world." And he wanted everyone to understand one thing:

If you provoke the red polar bear, you will lose more than you ever imagined.

Inside the KGB's First Chief Directorate, agents monitoring overseas financial networks reported a dramatic and immediate response: every account tied to Chechen separatist financing was suddenly emptied. Funds vanished, assets frozen or redirected through obscure legal channels. Whatever remained was hastily withdrawn by anonymous parties, clearly aware of what was coming.

It didn't matter.

Without Western capital, the Chechen rebels' self-declared liberation struggle collapsed from within. The Soviet state had proven it didn't need to slaughter every Chechen fighter.

It only needed to starve the movement to death.

And those who once backed them? The message was now crystal clear:

If funding Chechen extremism ends with your name on a KGB hit list, will you risk your own neck?

If a Soviet operative can reach across oceans to find you in any corner of the world—will your second half of life be peaceful?

That was the true weapon behind Yanaev's statecraft. Not just bullets, but fear—systematic, surgically applied, and backed by the silent force of a global hunt unit with the full power of a superpower behind it.

In London and Paris, panic seeped into intelligence circles. High-level briefings turned frantic. Hawks within MI6 and DGSE pushed for countermeasures, for revenge, for reassertion of dominance. But both governments, after assessing the wider implications, quietly shelved retaliation plans.

Instead, they issued quiet orders:

Cease all operations in the North Caucasus.

Pull agents out of Georgia and Chechnya.

Freeze further aid and arms shipments.

The final straw came in the form of a terse statement from the Soviet Foreign Ministry—a diplomatic communique that barely disguised its threat:

"Any further escalation will be considered an act of war. Our response will not be symmetrical. We are prepared to destabilize the economic core of Western Europe."

It wasn't bluster. Western finance ministries knew it. The Soviets had already demonstrated their cyber capabilities, their ability to weaponize disinformation, their deep infiltration of European political parties. One more step and the entire chessboard could flip.

Now that the financial arteries had been severed, Yanayev turned his gaze inward, to the final phase of the campaign: cleaning up the last of the Chechen armed factions.

From Moscow, the Presidium issued its final directive to the Caucasus Military District:

End it. No survivors.

Soviet reconnaissance planes began blanketing the airspace above the dense mountains straddling the Georgian–Chechen border. IL-38s swept terrain day and night. Satellite data from Oko systems fed targeting information directly to high-altitude bombers.

No longer hampered by political hesitation or foreign interference, Soviet forces now operated with grim clarity. It was not just counterinsurgency.It was extermination.

And deep in the Kremlin, Yanaev marked one more name off his long, blood-stained list of enemies.

"Basayev, Khattab, Umarov, must die!"