THE electronic dance track video opens with Vladimir Putin, shirtless. He’s wearing a silver Russian Orthodox cross and a Soviet ushanka army hat, and grooving to music videos synced to a supercut of military tanks, aircrafts and explosions.
“Launch your special military Opa-op-op-operation! Not invasion of another sovereign nation!” he sings.
Xi Jinping then chimes in: “I’ve been waiting long time. I like the sound. I might get special with Taiwan now.”
President Donald Trump soon joins in: “I’m on a roll. Totally unbound. Maybe I’ll just grab Greenland now.”
Soon all three harmonise in matching sunglasses: “Everybody gets their own special military operation!”
The members of this boy band supergroup are not the actual leaders of Russia, China and the United States, of course. They are puppets in an episode of Puppet Regime, an Instagram account that delivers 90 seconds of scripted satire with heads of state reimagined as heads of felt.
Their high jinks include a mix of one-off parodies of current events, recurring bits and extended musical numbers. One of the more memorable songs had Kim Jong Un hyping his North Korean beach development that references Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys.
The twist: Rather than the work of professional comedians, Puppet Regime is written and produced by Eurasia Group, the geopolitical risk consultancy run by Ian Bremmer.
If geopolitical consultants producing a puppet show conjures an image of Henry Kissinger with a sock on his hand squeaking an explanation of realpolitik, then you get it. Seriously silly contrasts are the point. In a little more than a year, the account of roughly twice weekly send-ups has grown to more than 510,000 followers and achieved a bipartisan group of followers, including members of the Trump administration like Sebastian Gorka, a deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism.
At its heart, Puppet Regime follows the three principles that guide Eurasia Group: “What the hell is happening in the world? How do we understand it? And how do we explain it?” Bremmer said.
Puppet Regime follows in the satirical footsteps of other TV puppets, political and otherwise, including The Muppet Show, Kukly in Russia, Les Guignols in France and Spitting Image in Britain.
Defanging felt heads
Puppets lend themselves to political satire because they offer “a separation from reality that allows you to take bigger leaps,” said Rob Smigel, a comedian and former writer for Saturday Night Live who is best known as the creator of Triumph the Comic Insult Dog.
“Cartoons and puppets are inherently benign, by comparison, to flesh and blood humans,” he added.
“It goes back to court jester days when the guy who was dressed in the silly outfit could get away with saying more outrageous things because he was already so low status that the blow didn’t strike his heart.”
Nevertheless, the show’s use of comedy and social media to defang authoritarian world leaders leads some political insiders to wonder if Eurasia Group is straying from its lane.
“Jon Stewart, for some audiences, revolutionised the way in which they consumed news,” said Ned Price, a former spokesperson for the State Department in the Biden administration.
“It is not his responsibility,” he added, “to report impartially or fairly on whatever the development is. It’s his responsibility to make people laugh, which he does well.
“So maybe that’s a way of capturing my concern with consultancy. It’s not the Eurasia Group’s responsibility or underlying objective to appeal on a cultural level to a broader audience.”
Bremmer is quick to brush off suggestions that Puppet Regime might distract from Eurasia Group’s core business or cause clients or world leaders to take their work less seriously.
“None of the heads of state that I meet with have a problem with it,” he said. “None of the CEOs.”
Puppets pulling punches
The origins of Puppet Regime began a decade ago at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, when Bremmer, 55, who self-identifies as a lifelong Muppet fan, recalled telling his friend Brian Collins about his dream to do “something with puppets.”
Two years later, meeting Collins for breakfast in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Bremmer was surprised to find the table set for three. Smiling up at him was a Muppet-style puppet of Bremmer.
The gift’s timing was fortuitous. It was 2017, and Bremmer had realised that he had millions of followers across social media but no content for them. So his team pitched a TV show to public television station WNET called GZERO World With Ian Bremmer. Puppet Regime was developed as a comedy segment to run at the end of each episode.
In February of 2025, GZERO Media started an independent Instagram account in addition to the segments appearing on the TV show. At first, the posts received about 10,000 views in the first 24 hours, according to the company; now, posts garner 100,000 to 400,000 views in that same time frame.
The scripts and music are written and performed by Alex Kliment, 46, a former reporter for The Financial Times and independent filmmaker who has been an analyst with Eurasia Group since 2006.
The studio setup is bare bones. It’s just Kliment with an iPhone, a green screen, a laptop and mic. He voices most of the puppets, including Trump, Putin, Angela Merkel of Germany, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of Iran, and performs them all.
If a scene has more than one puppet he shoots each separately, and sends the filmed recordings and audio to GZERO Media’s video editor to stitch together. Finished videos are posted to social media channels about an hour later.
The cast, so far, is made up of 17 puppet heads of state (plus about a dozen side characters), which cost US$500 (RM1,958) to US$2,500 (RM9,788) each.
They vary from “full builds” like Trump, to ones that can have their arms, facial features and wardrobe swapped out to make different characters, like a Mr Potato Head. For example, Khamenei and Netanyahu share the same body.
The upper echelons of the political class tend to be a clubby world, and since Eurasia Group’s client list is largely private, it’s difficult to say if the satire of Puppet Regime goes soft where the company has conflicts of interest.
Bremmer waves off concerns about the puppets pulling punches where he has clients or friendship with world leaders (like with the government of Canada).
“It’s not like we have a Chinese wall between our media company and our consulting,” he said. “It’s all the same analysis.”
For Bremmer, Puppet Regime is less about taking aim at specific individuals or countries. Rather it sends up the political game of global power relations and those angling to dominate it.
“The people act in absurd ways because the system is absurd,” he said. — ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
