The James Bond link to insult hurled at Ukraine government
AMONG the more obscure insults Vladimir Putin has thrown at the Ukrainian government is that it is run by ‘Banderite thugs’.
The term of abuse, used widely by Russians, refers to Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera, who fought for its independence and whose assassination by the KGB in 1959 inspired Ian Fleming’s James Bond novel The Man With The Golden Gun.
In the 1965 book, Bond is brainwashed to kill his boss, M, with a ‘curious sort of contraption’ that shoots a poisonous liquid. Fleming devised the plot from evidence heard at the trial of Bandera’s killer.
The KGB agent had been given a customised pistol that fired a jet of cyanide gas intended to leave its target dead with only the symptoms of cardiac arrest.
At the last minute, however, the KGB agent backed out, before trying again later and poisoning Bandera with cyanide in Munich.
In the 1974 film of Fleming’s novel, Christopher Lee plays Francisco Scaramanga, an assassin with a golden gun.