A two-minute video of a Russian soldier attempting to rescue a cat that had climbed up a tree in Nizhny Novgorod has gone viral for its uncanny ability to capture all things Russian.
The video, which was published late March on YouTube but has only now gone viral, opens with a large crowd gathered around a tree and the cat's owner begging him to climb back down: "Come here, son! Come back, my sweetie!"
The camera then zooms out to reveal a young soldier in uniform, taking the situation very seriously and vowing to rescue the cat. The crowd entrusts him with the task and follows the orders he barks out: "Get me a rope!" he shouts, promising to "do a trick" to get the cat down.
The young soldier then stations himself on the third or fourth floor of a residential building across from the tree where the cat is perched. He ties the rope to a bottle full of water and flings it at the tree with the obvious goal of catching the branch that the cat is clinging to.
He misses, however, and a loud crash can be heard as the bottle goes careening through the building's second floor window.
Not one to be discouraged, however, the soldier marches on, this time using a roll of toilet paper and a rope to try and reel the cat in.
When that too fails, another resident offers a bottle of milk, but the soldier asks for an ax instead. He is then shown chopping away at the tree while the cat looks on from several meters above him.
The tree falls, just as planned — but it lands on an electricity wire. The wire, viewers soon learn, is hot, and the residents frantically shout this at the cat, who appears to realize this on his own before he scurries off and leaps down into the snow.
It was not clear whether the cat actually returned after this heroic rescue.
But the soldier considered his job done. "I'm going home to sleep now," he is shown saying into the camera.
