It do be like that

Oh shit, that's right - it's a dir. Perhaps cp -rl /usr /ussr then? 😂

in soviet russia sym links you

It's a hard link.

Or make a FS module that can redirect requests from usr to ussr, and every time it does a redirect it creates a log entry so you troubleshoot and fix the source of the problem.

Then have a cron job that sends the logs daily to both Santa and Putin

Correct me if I'm wrong but the Linux Kernel itself does not enforce a directory structure at all. It's the user space (including the init ram image) that mounts the system directories wherever they want them.

Edit: Besides inside mountable system filesystems like sysfs or /proc etc