Watching images of the war from Ukraine, it is hard to believe that this is happening right now, here in our time. There are other wars going on, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Eritrea, all major conflicts but this one is so near to us in Europe. The horrors of war are being delivered into our sitting rooms by a media frenzy, we are kept very well informed of the suffering of the Ukrainian people. But even now, 70 days from the Russian invasion it is fading, going down the list of what is headlines today. The other wars don’t even get a mention anymore. We don’t even talk about the invasion of Iraq by the US and UK and the disastrous consequences of that unjust and ill conceived invasion of West into East.
There is in the Russian psyche a fear, a memory of this happening before and it happening again. Napoleon 200 years ago and Hitler 120 years later. The literature classic “War and Peace” by the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy helped to consolidate this facet of the Russian collective memory. After the collapse of the USSR the borders between East and West moved decidedly Eastwards and a certain vulnerability was creeping in as NATO gathered more and more allies and the freedoms being experienced in the expanding EU were attracting more and more applicants. Ukraine became the buffer zone. And then within Russia the rise and rise of the strong man with his iron grip on power has led to this terrible conflict in the present.
So many failings in human nature come into play to create such conflict. The classic “absolute power corrupts absolutely” in the case of Putin, the modern day Tsar of Russia, ex KGB himself, used to spreading fear among any potential dissent and quite openly using highly toxic poisons on known dissidents. The rise of a very wealthy elite. by various nefarious activities ably assisted by banking corporations in the West. and generally supported by a greedy capitalist system only too happy to turn a blind eye on the ethics of how all this wealth was acquired. And in the global market of gas and oil Russia had become a key player in the provision of these much “needed” essentials within the western European democracies.
WE have two mighty military powers facing each other off, as has been the case since 1948 with formation of NATO and the huge military capability of the old USSR. With a a massive nuclear arsenal at each others disposal we have entered a phase of human history that again threatens to escalate into something too terrible to contemplate.