You have the advantage over me. It may be that you are reading this now in your makeshift fallout shelter, hair falling out and bleeding from the gums as the nuclear winter descends. More likely you are saying, rather smugly, to your neighbour: ‘I knew he was taking the piss. He’s a right one, that Putin.’ Or perhaps Vlad’s forces are already in London, having swept through western Europe in about eight hours, the Germans for once outdoing the French with their alacrity to surrender. Well, that should see an end to Stonewall and the Tavistock Clinic, no? Every cloud, etc.
I would not wish to underestimate the threat posed by Russia, nor do I have any trust in or liking for its clever, suavely thuggish leader — even if Putin’s general position on those culture war issues is rather closer to that of the vast majority of ordinary people living west of the Elbe than is their own leadership elite’s. The bullying of Ukraine is a crime and we should stand up to it, just as we should have been rather more vociferous when he was bullying Georgia. But it is nonetheless the case that the tragedy of the current situation is one which we in the West have fostered, much as we have done for the past seven or eight hundred years.
We have behaved badly towards Russia both historically and recently, treating it and its leaders with hostility
We have behaved badly towards Russia both historically and recently, usually treating the vast country and its leaders with contempt and hostility, invading it from time to time, otherwise meddling perfidiously in its affairs and always refusing to allow the Russians what, periodically, they yearn for — to be accepted as part of the civilised western world. Both now, with Putin, and previously with the Soviet Union — and indeed all the way back to the time of the Kievan Rus — the Russian attitude towards the West is characterised here as ‘paranoid’.
