Russia and Ukraine

LONDON, England -- With all the seriousness that it can muster, the Commmunist Party of St Petersburg has accused the new Bond girl of treachery.
Its argument rests on two claims: that Bond films are Western propaganda, and that Olga Kurylenko - for that is her real name - was raised and educated free of charge by the Soviet Union, which she now implicitly attacks by appearing alongside a British spy so influential that his real-world status as the embodiment of a thousand escapist fantasies is immaterial.Kurylenko is 28 and from Ukraine.This means that the Soviet Union actually relinquished her to free markets and democracy at the age of 11, having thoroughly oppressed, irradiated and impoverished her country first.Still, the St Petersburg Communists have a point.How would we feel if Daniel Craig defected to Moscow to star in the new wave of patriotic Russian films that the Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has promised to fund?Or if John Cleese, nurtured and lionised by British audiences from the era of Monty Python to his accession to the mythic role of Q, signed on to the payroll of resurgent Russian nationalism and gloried in their gadgets?Outraged, that's how. But the St Petersburgers' argument does have one serious catch. The Bond film franchise has never, in any of its forms, been anti-Russian.Even in the depths of the Cold War its chief villains were freelancers. When Smersh fielded an assassin to take out 007 once and for all, he was an Irishman.In another caper the KGB turned its top operative loose on him, but to little effect. Remember Agent XXX? Bond does. She was the spy who loved him.