By Brad Erickson

ZHASHKOYVCHI — The world’s longest and highest capacity tartar sauce pipeline, known in Russian as the аромат ракеты (lit. “flavor-rocket”), has been cut by Ukranian freedom fighters, dealing a devastating blow to Russian geopolitical and culinary ambitions.

The pipeline, which stretches from the tartar sauce production hub of Kraków to Moscow’s mass markets, passes though Ukraine, where volunteer militants from the countryside used tractors to breach the steel conduit. The free-flowing tartar sauce soon formed a river down the main street of Starhi Zahoriv where gleeful villagers descended for an impromptu fish fry.

Mayor Demytro Kravchenko declared “Autonomy is delicious,” a slogan soon adopted on social media, delivering a much-needed boost of morale amidst continued Russian bombing. Engineering students from the nearby University of Lublin shunted the delicious sauce through irrigation systems to supply towns throughout the region.

Banners displayed throughout a defiant Ukraine now read: Вони намагалися забрати нашу землю: ми взяли їх соус тартар or “They Tried to Take our Land: We Took their Tartar Sauce.”

Our Moscow correspondent reports despondent diners reduced to adorning boiled potatoes with an ersatz tartar sauce made of condensed milk flavored with toothpaste and pureed sardines.

Local babushka, Natasha Kuznetsova, was seen spitting the substitute sauce on the street and remarking dolefully, “No tartarska, no flavor. No flavor, no hope. I think Russia will lose war now. What soldier will die for country with no tartarska?”

Brad Erickson, PhD, lecturer faculty in Liberal Studies at San Francisco State University, composed the book, music and lyrics of four comedic alt-musical theater productions: Apostasy of the Sea Monkeys, No Time Like Never, DayGlo Yodel, and Low Expectations. His scholarship on humor includes “Grotesque logic: Catalan carnival utopias and the politics of laughter.” (2021) Journal of Visual Studies 36(4-5), 507-523, “George Clinton and David Bowie: The space race in black and white.” (2016). Popular Music and Society 39(6), 563-578, and “Les virtuts cíviques del caganer.” [The civic virtues of the defecator] (2011). Caramella: Revista de Música i Cultura Popular, 25, 47-50.