Vladimir Putin’s giant table sparks absurd memes—including an encounter with Marina Abramovic

The Ukraine crisis is hardly a laughing matter, but the size of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s table as he meets world leaders and his own government ministers has spawned viral memes and a plethora of increasingly absurd visuals. One of the zaniest swapped Marina Abramovic for the French president Emmanuel Macron, who held talks with Putin earlier this month, in homage to the artist’s 2010 performance at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, when she sat opposite visitors and gazed into their eyes for hours on end. Other memes depicted everything from the Last Supper to the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, and a table-dancing Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Chechnya, filling the seemingly endless space between the two men (Macron would reportedly not submit to a Russian-administered PCR test for Covid-19 before sitting with Putin). Before long, rival Italian and Spanish furniture purveyors were battling to take credit for designing the table, perhaps in response to a mock Ikea ad meme offering a “Putin table for hosting guests”, for the princely sum of $599.99. The memes are only bound to multiply after Putin's Kremlin meeting on Monday with his Security Council, and a signing ceremony recognising the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics in eastern Ukraine. Putin and each of the separatist republic leaders sat behind their own huge desk—at a distance, of course.