Teddy Bears and Mathias Rust, Common Ground

Studio Total via EPA

The teddy bears — 879 of them — landing by parachute in a residential area in Minsk, Belarus, on July 4, the country's Independence Day.

What do teddy bears and Mathias Rust have in common? They both got generals fired. To put a little detail out there, on July 4, 2012 (coincidentally, Belarus's independence day) a human rights group from Sweden in a light plane flew over Minsk and dropped 879 teddy bears, which carried pro-democracy messages. In response the strongman of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko fired the generals in charge of air defense and border patrol.

Mathias Rust was a German teenager who on June 1, 1968, flew a rented Cessna from Finland to Red Square. His original plan was to land inside the Kremlin, but he wisely realized that landing there could lead to immediate arrest and disappearance. Rust's violation of what was then Soviet airspace led to the firing of many senior officers, including Defence Minister Marshal of the Soviet Union Sergei Sokolov and the head of the Soviet Air Defense, former World War II fighter ace pilot Chief Marshal Alexander Koldunov. (h/t Wikipedia).