‘A Bullet for the Kremlin’ fires through fiction and hits geopolitical fact—Putin bleeds, empires panic, and a Black man holds the smoking drone.
In A Bullet forthe Kremlin, Joseph Ejike Ojih dares to ask a question that modern
diplomacy politely avoids: What if justice must be delivered not with treaties,
but with a trigger? The result is a political thriller that punches through the
fog of war and the velvet curtains of global politics to reveal something raw,
unsettling, and urgent: that even in a world ruled by empires, the most
powerful force can still be a man with nothing left to lose and a bullet that
knows its target.
Ojih, an adjunct professor at Morgan State University and
the University of Maryland Global Campus, crafts a story of haunting
precision—one that mirrors the anxieties of our time, where democracy gasps for
air and tyranny wears a suit. His protagonist, Emeka Onwubiko, is a Nigerian
student of military tactics studying in Kyiv, Ukraine. But Emeka is not just
another foreign scholar. He is a ghost in waiting. When Ukrainian intelligence
calls on him to lead an assassination plot against Vladimir Putin, Emeka does
not hesitate. “I want full citizenship,” he demands, “not papers. Not promises.
I want a passport with my name on it and a flag I can carry without shame.”
This quote, blunt and yearning, crystallizes what the entire novel is about—not
just national identity, but personal redemption.
The novel begins on a cold October morning in Kyiv, where
the Ukrainian flag flaps with resolve and every chalk mark on a wall counts the
dead. Emeka, whose childhood in Nigeria taught him how to survive tyranny under
General Sani Abacha, now learns from his Ukrainian mentors how to fight it. As
a man who has known dictatorship in different languages and geographies, Emeka
becomes the perfect vessel for a mission the West dares not own: to kill
Vladimir Putin, the lion of Moscow. Like the Russian proverb says, a chained
dog does not fear the wolf—Emeka has lived long enough in the margins of empire
to know that the only way to speak to power is to make it bleed.
The story unfolds with the cadence of a spy’s
heartbeat—tight, deliberate, and laced with dread. Emeka assembles a team that
reads like a roster of broken prophets: a sniper exiled for refusing to kill
children, a demolitions expert who lost his family in Mariupol, a hacker whose
sister’s suicide was caused by a deepfake scandal, and an actor-assassin who
can mimic anyone but himself. Each man has his scars. Each carries history like
a concealed weapon.
The plan is surgical: a drone sniper strike at a
weapons-testing compound in Vladikavkaz, a ghostly approach cloaked in
Belarusian uniforms and the arrogance of power. The tension is not only in the
plot—it is in the questions Ojih leaves hanging like fog in the streets of
Sochi. Who authorizes morality? What is the cost of doing right in a world that
pays dividends for wrong?
Much like Xi Zhongxun’s belief in “forging”—the idea that
suffering hardens you for history’s tasks—Emeka too is a forged man. And like
Xi Jinping, who once said, “I didn’t just see power—I saw the fickleness of the
world,” Emeka knows that behind every command lies betrayal, behind every
mission, a grave.
The narrative threads together real history with fictional
precision. Ukraine’s ongoing war, the collapse of the post-Cold War order, the
CIA’s shadowy role in global rearrangements, and even the re-emergence of
authoritarianism all float in the novel like shrapnel waiting to pierce. The
failed shot that wounds Putin but doesn’t kill him becomes the turning point
not just in the story but in the geopolitical imagination of the reader. In
Ojih’s world, the bullet doesn’t just change Putin. It changes who controls the
myth of invincibility.
After the failed hit, the team scatters like ash in the
wind. Emeka finds himself housed by the CIA in Virginia, not celebrated, but
watched. He is no hero. He is an idea, and ideas are dangerous. From there, A
Bullet for the Kremlin mutates into a different kind of thriller—a cold war
of shadows, betrayals, and code names. The ghost has struck, but the machine
rebuilds itself. Putin, wounded but not dead, retreats into darker chambers.
Mikhail Mishustin, the Russian Prime Minister, begins maneuvering like a man
who smells a vacant throne.
This is where Ojih’s novel breaks out of genre and into
commentary. The post-assassination world is not safer—it is more dangerous.
Russia bleeds not from a wound, but from paranoia. The Kremlin blames the West,
NATO, and even Africa. Sanctions tighten. Propaganda floods. And in a brilliant
twist, we discover that even within Emeka’s mission were layers of
betrayal—someone may have leaked their plan before the first trigger was
pulled. Perhaps the ghost was never meant to succeed. Perhaps the point was to
stir the bear, not to slay it.
The novel’s second half deals with Black Prism, a shadow
operation to build a new world order from Moscow to Tehran to Beijing. This
isn’t fiction anymore—it’s political foresight. The economic realignments
post-2022, China’s silent influence campaigns, and Iran’s cyber tactics all
find echoes here. The fictional Lev Gusev, a Russian-Armenian oligarch, hosts a
summit to birth a new geopolitical axis that doesn’t just exclude the West—it
renders it irrelevant.
And Emeka, now burned but unbroken, decides to strike again.
“If justice is treason,” he says, “then I choose treason.” In that sentence
lies the soul of the novel. It is not a call to war—it is a call to truth in a
world that no longer recognizes it.
Published independently on May 23, 2025, this 110-page work
(ISBN: 979-8285078821) is Ojih’s masterstroke. For readers who want Jason
Bourne with a conscience or John le Carré filtered through African realism and
Eastern European grit, this is the book. You won’t just turn the pages. You’ll
count them like time bombs.
By the end, we are left not with victory, but with
understanding: that assassination is not the end of tyranny, just its mutation.
That the bullet may miss—but the idea it carried lives on. And that sometimes, a
whisper can do what an army cannot.
Available now on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=joseph+ojih&crid=GEHOD7P7DGHN&sprefix=joseph+ojih%2Caps%2C92&ref=nb_sb_noss_1
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