Kremlin Kung Pao Chicken Index: What It Means For Global Politics

In the world of United States politics, many are familiar with the “Pentagon Pizza Index” and what it means for the country. To summarize for the unfamiliar, the Pizza Index measures the level of activity of the pizza places surrounding the Pentagon, the center of the United States Department of Defense (DOD), which is now the Department of War. The more pizza ordered, the more people who stay late at the Pentagon and need a quick dinner, which also means that there may or may not be a reason for so many people to stay late at the Pentagon. This measure has been used to successfully anticipate U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts and coups alike, much to the chagrin of the DOD. But something that people don’t realize about this measure is that it’s not just limited to the U.S. 

While Russia is not known for particularly enjoying takeout pizza like we Americans do (with the notable exception of Gorbachev and his Pizza Hut), there’s still cheap fast food ways into a cold Russian heart. For example, bastardized Chinese food. 

One such place, Express Panda (not at all related to Panda Express, which closed all its Russian locations in 2022), located next to the Kremlin in Moscow, has frequently been recorded to have surges in popularity in a manner not unlike the pizza places by the Pentagon. Based on data available from online sources like Yelp and Facebook, the restaurant’s top-selling item, their classic Kung Pao Chicken, is most frequently delivered to a particular “Pladimir Vutin” in an abandoned warehouse just outside the Kremlin complex. This evidence of Putin frequenting a bad Chinese place may be a smoking gun in itself, but the most damning piece of evidence may be the singular five-star review this place has received online, from a certain “K. G. Best,” declaring that, “This Kung Pao Chicken is good enough to annex Manchuria for. I would fight 50 bears and live 50 days in Siberia for this chicken. Sorry, babushka.”

But what good is this information for us? Why would Putin loving terrible Chinese food matter to us unless we were attempting to turn his orange sauce into Agent Orange? Well, with the way that information is frozen in Russia, analyzing the statistics of this one takeout place may provide us with insight into what the Russians are keeping from us.

For one, we can use spikes in Chinese takeout delivery and the limited spread of information from Russians online to determine if any major protests or new communist uprisings against the All-Russian Party have occurred. We can then match this data to any suspected military operations conducted presumably by the world’s second strongest military. We can even use it in comparison to the number of Yeti and Zombie Mammoth sightings in Siberia to see if the Russian government is acting on this imminent supernatural threat within their borders. Yet, all of this information pales in comparison to the most important correlation. We can use it to determine when Putin is taking his time off. 

For militaries and governments of the world, it would be pivotal to know the exact schedule of the leader of one of the world’s superpowers. And yet, this is exactly what we can find out from the Kremlin Kung Pao Chicken Index. By carefully analyzing the program schedule of many major Russian broadcast channels, we can discover more about Putin’s crippling addiction to bad soap operas. Forget Anna Karenina, this Russian man is wailing nightly over his own self-proclaimed “not very good” telenovelas with a box of Chinese takeout in his fortified complex in the middle of Moscow. 

Unfortunately for the rest of the world, this information may be hard to act on, considering, like previously stated, the Kremlin is a fortified complex in the middle of Moscow. Regardless, this information may be useful to political experts and diplomats when planning when best to strike against the cold-hearted leader of the perpetually wintry nation up north. 

Perhaps at least, it may be helpful to know where to treat Putin to for lunch and what kind of conversation he enjoys. Maybe then he will melt his frosty exterior and consider looking a Western power in the eye as an equal. Until then, we may be at the mercy of the singular Express Panda restaurant in Moscow, which seems unlikely to run out of poultry for the foreseeable future.