Victory for Ukraine?

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A year and a half after it got under way, the war in Ukraine shows no sign of coming to an end. Not coming to an end, it is interesting to explore what might happen in case Zelensky’s famous counteroffensive finally starts doing more than reoccupying half a godforsaken village here, half a godforsaken village there, but gains some real strategic traction instead. As, for example, by developing the following scenario.

In the flat, mostly open terrain that is Ukraine airpower ought to be the key to everything. Worried about Ukraine’s ground-based air defenses, Putin’s air force continues to make its existence felt mainly by its absence from the battlefield; a development which, ere hostilities broke out, few people predicted or would have predicted.

Next, so the scenario, Ukrainian forces put the Kerch Strait rail and road bridges out of action. Not just for hours or days as they have done at least twice in the past, but in such a way as to require extensive repairs lasting weeks or months. Armed, trained and supplied by the West, Zelensky’s troops break through key Russian fortifications somewhere along the front. They retake some occupied territory and cut their enemies’ land bridge that reaches from the Donbas along the Azov Sea coast all the way down to the greatest prize of all: the Crimea with its great port, Sebatopol.

With their logistics in a mess, and perhaps left without clear instructions from Moscow, major parts of Russia’s fighting force disintegrate. Others either retreat or surrender. Relying on combinations of modern technologies, including not just land-to sea missiles but perhaps unmanned surface vehicles too, Ukraine could blockade and barrage Crimea, trapping Russia’s Black Sea Fleet like bugs in a bottle. If Ukrainian forces appear to be preparing for a frontal assault on Crimea, risks of Russian use of tactical nuclear weapons might rise—with consequences that would require more than one separate article to think out.

Short of Putin resorting to the use of nuclear weapons a comparison of the forces on both sides, along with the outcome of recent combats, suggests that Ukrainian forces could prevail. Conversely, any major Russian attempt to take back even modest amounts of previously occupied territories would likely fail. Were Russia’s air force and antiaircraft defenses to suffer substantial losses, this could weaken the defense of Moscow or other Russian strategic assets.

Ukrainian forces appear not to be using Western arms to attack targets in Russia. However, with their home-manufactured weapons they are increasing indirect and direct fire strikes against headquarters and logistical facilities, transportation hubs, and troop formations deep inside Russia. Even early in the war, a Ukrainian Neptune missile was able to sink the Moskva, Russia’s Black Sea flagship. By now even Moscow, almost a thousand kilometers in the rear, has been repeatedly hit by Ukrainian drones. Not that they caused any great damage; as is also the case with their Russian counterparts, the warheads they carry are too small to kill more than a few people (mostly civilians) here, bring about the collapse of a building there. However, their psychological impact is said to have been considerable.

Such, seen from the point of view of Kiev and its Western backers, is the optimistic scenario. Note, though, the elephant in the room: namely, the fact that it leaves the Donbas, its natural resources and its industry, in Russian hands. Heavily fortified–fortification is an art in which, as Germans of all people should know, the Russians are past masters—and containing quite some mixed-population cities, it is a tough nut to crack. Disorderly, to be sure, but packed not only with regular Russian forces but with every kind of militia under the sun. Just look at the weeks-long struggle for Bachmut. And behind those cities Russia’s endless spaces, soon to be enveloped in the arms of General Winter, will be waiting.

Such developments will no doubt reduce Putin to dire straits. They will not, however necessarily bring about the end of the war. That could be achieved only in case he and his clique finally give in and ask for negotiations—something which, as long as he remains in control, is unlikely to happen.

So everything depends on Putin being removed by his own people, likely either the military, the various security services, or some combination of both. Speculation about such a coup has been rife right from the first days of the “special military operation.” With the exception of the rather strange and ill-understood Wagner “Uprising,” though, there are few signs to show either that Putin’s will is weakening or that he is losing control.

My conclusion? Even if Ukrainian forces book additional military successes like those outlined above, the real decisions will be political and have to be made in Moscow and specifically behind the walls of the Kremlin. Until they are, the war will go on.

“Unto Him Your Passion”

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A good friend has suggested that I write down the shortest possible summary of everything I’ve learnt, or believe I’ve learnt, from my twenty-something years’ worth of researching and writing about, women, feminism, and the relationship between the sexes.

Hardly an easy task, but never was a suggestion more welcome! So here goes.

*

“Everything concerning women is a mystery, and the mystery has one solution: pregnancy” (Nietzsche).

“Men and women are similar in some ways but different in others” (Plato).

Both the similarities and the differences are partly biological, partly socially “constructed.” Any further attempt to disentangle the two will only lead to absurdities,

Attempts to solve the problem by drawing analogies with other animals are very problematic. This is because a. There are so many species, all of them different form each other, with which to compare; and b. The decision as to which ones are or are not relevant is necessarily arbitrary.

No known society treats its male and female members in exactly the same way. Pregnancy and giving birth apart, the most important reason for this is physiological. Even in modern societies many jobs require plenty of strength and stamina. Fields in which men, on the average, enjoy clear advantages over women. 

For over a century now, each generation of feminists has proclaimed its own version of “the new women.” She who smoked like a man, drove an automobile like a man, attended university like a man, wore pants like a man, entered the professions and worked like a man, boxed like a man. and even—would you believe it—ejaculated like a man. All this, under the banner of “empowerment”! But underneath little if anything has changed.

In all known societies, the higher up the slippery pole of power, wealth and fame you climb the fewer the women you meet. Among those you do meet, far fewer have made it by their own efforts as opposed to those of their male relatives.

Furthermore, whatever success career women have enjoyed has come mainly at the expense of other women. Why? Because, for every successful career woman, there are two or three others who serve her in doing household work, minding children, and so on. To this extent, but also because successful women tend to have fewer children, feminism is self-defeating.

Whatever success feminism has had has had is mainly due to the prevalence (in the West) of the so-called Long Peace. It will pass (in Israel, my own Israel, it is starting to pass right now). I am not aware of feminism achieving very much in Russia or Ukraine. Let alone the Sudan.

Last not least: In all known societies, it is what men do that people consider the most important of all (Margaret Mead). This is even more true of women than of men; as the Dutch poet Chawa Weinberg put it, “If men were to bleed, how large and imposing the sanitary napkins.” Hence I do not see feminists’ great successes. All I see is PE; it is like pursuing a mirage.

As the Bible puts it: “Unto him your passion, and he shall rule you” (Genesis 3.16).

Stranger and Stranger

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Often the longer the time since a conspiracy – successful or otherwise – has taken place, the more details about it emerge. Not so in the case of Putin, Prigozhin and the latter’s supposed uprising against the former’s regime. Follow some of the questions that remain open, let alone provided with properly documented answers.

  1. Who is Yevgeny Prigozhin? How on earth did he develop from a petty criminal, former jailbird and a street hawker of sausages into one of the most powerful and wealthiest persons in the whole of the Russian Federation?
  2. During his advancement, and just before he mounted his coup—if a coup it was—what was his relationship with Putin like? Who owed (or owned) whom, for what, and as a result of what?
  3. Is it true, as has been claimed, that America’s intelligence apparatus had advance notice of the intended coup?
  4. If America’s intelligence apparatus knew of what was about to happen, how come the Russian one did not?
  5. Did Prigozhin have allies within the Kremlin? If so, who were they and what role did they play?
  6. How were the spearheads of the Wagner Group able to advance as fast and as far as they did?
  7. Why was there scarcely any attempt at resistance?
  8. Where was Prigozhin himself at the time these events took place? Did he really believe that, with a force of just a few thousand men, he would be able to bring down Putin’s government and set up a new one in its place? If not, what on earth was he trying to achieve?
  9. Exactly what caused the coup—again, if a coup it was—to fizzle out and come to an end?
  10. Where was Putin during the coup? What exactly did he do, and with the aid of whom?
  11. How come Putin, not normally the most kindly-disposed character in the world, agreed to have Prigozhin’s men, as well as Prigozhin himself, cross into Belorussia where they would be immune from retaliation?
  12. Why, after that, were accusations against Prigozhin and his men dropped, and why was the former’s confiscated property handed back to him?
  13. If Prigozhin really sought asylum in Belorussia, how come he was later seen—or said to be seen—in St. Petersburg?
  14. What happened to the camps Belorussia prepared to receive Prigozhin’s men? Were they ever used? If—which seems to be the case—not, where did the men go?
  15. Does the Wagner Group, as a cohesive formation capable of carrying out organized military operations, still exist? If so, is Prigozhin still in command of it? If not, who is?
  16. Both before and during the coup, Prigozhin’s verbal sallies were directed not against Putin himself but against minister of defense Sergei Shoigu and chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov. Following the coup’s failure, what has happened to these two men? Are they still in charge of anything, or have they been effectively sidelined?
  17. Finally—how has the coup affected Putin and his government? Has his position been weakened, as some in Ukraine and the West in particular claim? Or has it become stronger? Or was the entire affair just a hiccup with no really visible consequences?

 It is as Churchill said of Russia: a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.

Not Just Paris

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The name Enoch Powell is unlikely to strike a chord with most of those who are under sixty years old. Yet at the time I took my PhD in London (1969-71) he was all over, frequently appearing on TV (“the telly,” as people used to call it), radio, and the papers. Today it pleases me to re-post the lines I wrote about him back in 2017. Why? You ask. Just read on.

Enoch Powell was born at Stechford, a borough of the city of Birmingham, in 1912. The family was lower middle class; his father, Albert, was an elementary schoolteacher, his mother Ellen, a housewife. Their somewhat  constrained economic circumstances did not prevent Enoch from receiving a first class education, first at home—it is said that by the age of three, he could already read fairly well—and later at various grammar schools. Typical of the age, the most important part of the curriculum was formed by the classics, especially ancient Greek (a thorough mastery of Latin was considered self-evident) in which Powell soon revealed himself as a real prodigy. Later, at Cambridge, he not only received the highest possible, and extremely rare, grades but added German, modern Greek, Portuguese, Welsh, Urdu, and Russian.

In 1937 Powell, having completed his studies, went to Australia where, employed at the University of Sydney, he became the youngest professor in the entire Commonwealth. From there he sent letters to his parents expressing his disgust at Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s “terrible exhibition of dishonor, weakness and gullibility” in his attempts to appease Hitler. “The depths of infamy,” he added, “to which our accurst ‘love of peace’ can lower us are unfathomable.”

Returning to England as soon as World War II broke out, Powell joined the army which appreciated his linguistic skills and put him into its intelligence service. By the time he got out in 1945 he was a brigadier general, the youngest in the entire service. Entering politics, he was elected to Parliament as a conservative member, making several speeches against Constitutional changes which, the way he saw it, were slowly but surely leading to the breakup of the British Commonwealth and of Britain itself. He wore his immense learning lightly; his measured, eloquent and, above all, extremely clear delivery—I remember watching him on TV—soon turned him into a star performer. Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s he occupied a variety of senior positions, reaching the peak of his career in 1962 when he was appointed Secretary of Health under Harold Macmillan. This post he held until 1964 when Labor under Harold Wilson won the elections, pushing the Conservatives into the opposition. In 1965 the Conservative leader Edward Heath appointed him shadow Secretary of State for Defense.

It was during his time in the opposition that Powell first started drawing national attention by pointing out the danger of unrestricted immigration from Commonwealth countries. Especially Kenya which, over the previous few decades, had become home to many Indians and Pakistanis.  Discriminated against and oppressed by the country’s new African rulers, the people in question sought refuge in Britain. At the time I was living in Kilburn, a somewhat run-down but still respectable neighborhood in northwestern London where I often encountered them. On one hand there were the Indians who took over small neighborhood shops and, by working themselves and their families very hard indeed, started their way up the social ladder until one of them, Rishi Sunak, ended up as prime minister.  Contrasting with them were bands of young Moslems who, the papers said, were sometimes subject to what was popularly known as Paki-bashing.

It was a year or so before my arrival, on 20 April 1968, that Powell gave the speech for which he will forever be remembered:

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’ [referring to the Sybil in Virgil’s Aeneid]. That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the 20th century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now.

The reaction, both in Parliament and in the media, can be imagined. The day after he held the speech Heath, as leader of the opposition, took Powell’s post as shadow minister of defense away from him. He remained a member of Parliament until 1987, but was never again offered a cabinet post. From then to the present, in spite of warnings more numerous than the stars in the sky, no British government has dared taking the “resolute and urgent action” required. Instead, they contented themselves by inventing reasons why such action was not required.

With recent events in Paris in mind, we now know that he picked the wrong country for the right reasons. But that does not mean that London, and Amsterdam, and Brussels, and Berlin, and Vienna, are safe.

Guest Article: How Putin Enabled the Wagner Revolt

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by

Edward Luttwak*

Why do Russia’s wars always start with disaster? The answer is straightforward: because the autocrats who rule Russia — be they Tsars (with the exception of Napoleon’s nemesis Alexander I), Joseph Stalin or Vladimir Putin — appoint obedient toadies sadly lacking in military talent to command their forces.

And none is more out-of-his-depth than Sergei Shoigu, Putin’s minister of defense. Shoigu studied engineering and skipped military service altogether. Nonetheless, he was rapidly promoted all the way to full general and then minister of defense by Putin because of his uncritical loyalty, which was further guaranteed by his obscure Tuvan origins that gave him no Muscovite power base to threaten the Kremlin (his birthplace is much closer to Beijing than to Moscow).

As for Putin’s chief of staff, Valery Gerasimov, his incompetence is of a very modern sort, indeed postmodern. Just like some telegenic US generals with PhDs but no actual hands-on combat experience, Gerasimov preached “post-kinetic” warfare, in which cyber war, “information war” or “hybrid war” replaced old-fashioned infantry, armor and artillery combat.

It was Gerasimov who cooked up the brilliant plan that so convinced Putin — as well as the CIA, the US director of national intelligence and their fashionably post-kinetic military advisors — that the air-landed seizure of the Antonov field on the first night of the war would open the door to Kyiv. Absent post-kinetic delusions, the overhead photography alone should have sufficed to tell US intelligence that the Russians would fail: they were invading Europe’s largest country with an army of less than 140,000 troops, as opposed to the 800,000 [500,000? MvC] who invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, a country one-fifth the size of Ukraine and with one-quarter of the population. And, of course, as perfect yes-men, Shoigu and Gerasimov never told Putin that, if he wanted to invade Ukraine, he first had to declare war and mobilize the Russian army.

Even so, what happened next came as a great surprise. The failure of Gerasimov’s dazzling plan and the ignominious retreat from the edges of Kyiv and Kharkiv should have been followed by the usual Russian remedy but nothing happened. In 1941, when the German army easily defeated the Red Army to swiftly conquer Ukraine and start its march to Moscow, Stalin’s favorite toady Marshal Grigory Kulik was dismissed and eventually shot. Others were shot right away, and were replaced by officers previously set aside because they were not yes-men. Some were rescued from prison to take up command at the front. (Konstantin Rokossovsky, who had been arrested, badly tortured and locked up as a traitor, was patched up and given an entire army to lead; he would finish the war a victorious marshal.)

This is what Yevgeny Prigozhin expected from Putin: the swift dismissal of Shoigu and Gerasimov and their replacement by officers old-fashioned enough to have “kinetic” skills, and who would focus on building up effective infantry, armor and artillery units to capture Kyiv and conquer Ukraine. Instead, with Gerasimov and Shoigu inexplicably still in charge, the Russians continued to rely on “information warfare” to demoralize the Ukrainians into surrender, with non-stop propaganda and terror air attacks against random buildings in Kyiv and most other cities.

Not only did this “non-precision” bombing fail to hurt morale — it never does — but it was also hugely wasteful. As Russia’s rockets and ground-to-ground missiles started to run out, they turned to expensive air-to-ground missiles meant for high-value targets, such as air-base installations or at least battle tanks. But their warheads were too small to make much of an impression in built-up cities.

This is when Prigozhin, with his mercenaries, started his own land-combat campaign, contracted as always by the Russian government, this time to fight in Ukraine rather than in Libya or Mali or ex-French Congo. But, a few months later, he very soon found himself competing for manpower with contract units that were raised by the Russian army itself. These official units offered good pay to ex-servicemen and therefore competed with Wagner — but without its cadre of experienced mercenaries, they achieved very little.

All of which was frustrating for Prigozhin, who started to voice his complaints increasingly loudly, eventually asking why Shoigu and Gerasimov were still in-command when they should have been shot for incompetence, or at least kicked out of their jobs. Inexplicably — not only to him — Putin failed to take advantage of his dictatorial power to get rid of the pair of failures.

It was then that Shoigu and Gerasimov hit back by denying artillery shells and small-arms ammunition to Wagner, even when it was Wagner that was doing all the fighting in Bakhmut. Ultimately, it was a struggle between a very talented maverick — Prigozhin had started as a caterer — and the dull bureaucrat Shoigu and too-clever-by-half Gerasimov.

Stalin greatly valued such competition; even at the very end in 1945, he made Marshals Georgy Zhukov and Ivan Konev race one another to reach the center of Berlin with their separate armies. But Putin is no Stalin. He is still, after everything, the bureaucrat he has always been. He would never have dreamed of promoting the talented Prigozhin to run his war, in the way that Lincoln promoted the hard-drinking Grant.

In the coming days, Prigozhin will be captured or killed. Any trial would compound Putin’s colossal embarrassment. The reason he must fail is that, in Russia, he falls into a specific category: like Yemelyan Pugachev, who rebelled against Catherine the Great in 1773, Prigozhin has no power base in Moscow, let alone in the military and security establishment he has so savagely ridiculed.

Yet there is also a lesson in this for Putin: if he does not fire Shoigu and Gerasimov and start anew with leaders plucked from the smart younger officers who have emerged in recent fighting, he will have to abandon the war that has become Russia’s misfortune.

  • Edward Luttwak is a Maryland based American strategist with countless books, articles and consultancies to back him up. The present article was originally published in UnHerd.com and is here reproduced with the author’s permission.

God Help Us All

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By definition all armed conflicts, even strictly local ones, are dangerous to the people so unfortunate as to be caught in them. That said, there is no denying that some such conflicts are much more dangerous than others. Generally speaking, three factors are likely to make them so. The first is their strategic significance, as when hostilities threaten to cut off important international sources of food, energy, raw materials, transportation arteries, and so on. The second factor is foreign intervention. The third is the absence or presence in the belligerents’ hands of nuclear weapons.

*

The present Russo-Ukrainian War contains elements of all three factors. Ukraine is a large country with a far from negligible population of (before the war) about 40 million. It has long exported both oil (primarily vegetable oil of which it is the world’s largest supplier) and, which is even more important, wheat. As the price of this vital food goes up many “developing” countries will suffer shortages which in turn will bring on all the social and political consequences such shortages normally entail.

As Putin himself has repeatedly and correctly said, strategically speaking the importance of Ukraine can hardly be exaggerated. Controlling Ukraine, Russia should be able to dominate the Black Sea and prevent anyone from opening another front from that direction. Not controlling Ukraine, it will find doing so much harder if not impossible. During the Cold War the distance from the East/West border to Moscow was about 2,000 kilometers as the crow flies. Should NATO grant Zelensky’s demand and allow Ukraine to join NATO, then it will be down to about 1,000 kilometers. Briefly, Russia with Ukraine is an empire. Russia without Ukraine is a mere state among others, albeit still a huge and, thanks primarily to its nuclear arsenal, a very powerful one.

*

Next, foreign intervention. As anyone with a map can see, Russia is entirely lacking in natural borders. Granted, much of the southern part of the country (though not the Ukraine, of course) is mountainous and hard to cross. Not so the northern half which is as flat as, if nor flatter than, any other on earth.

Nor is it merely a question of geography. As Stalin once said, the country has always been backward. It was this backwardness that enabled first Mongols, then Ottomans, then Poles and Lithuanians, then Swedes, then French, then Anglo-French (in the Crimea, (1853-56), then Japanese (1904-5 and 1939), then Germans (in 1914-18 and 1941-45) to establish or try to establish their rule over huge parts of it. All this without even mentioning the Civil War of 1918-21, a low point in the country’s history which saw everybody treating it as carrion and sending in forces; including, in addition to most of the above, Americans, Estonians (who almost captured St. Petersburg), Romanians, Italians, and even Greeks. This is not a situation many Russians are eager to repeat.

Today, too, foreign intervention is one of the main reasons, perhaps even the reason, why the war is as dangerous as it is. Throughout the years of Ukrainian independence, from 1991 to 2022, both the West and Russia have been trying hard to draw the new country into their orbit. Doing so, between them they have used means fair and foul: including propaganda, economic ties, political legerdemain, military assistance, and at least one attempted coup and at least one poisoning to achieve their goal.

A war between Russia and Ukraine is one thing. A war between Russia and NATO, quite a different one. Currently Western weapons, provided by the West and operated by Western-trained crews, are being used against Russia, much to the latter’s chagrin. One by one, on both sides of the conflict, we can see the elements that could make for a third world war being put in place. The miracle is that it has not yet broken out.

*

Next, nuclear weapons. Starting in 1949, the year when the Soviet Union caught up with the United States and tested its own atomic bomb, nuclear weapons have affected war here on earth in two contradictory ways. First, the so-called balance of terror has undoubtedly prevented many international crises from escalating; not just those affecting the US and the USSR but also such as involved lesser powers such as India and Pakistan. Looking forward from 1945, who would have predicted that eighty years would pass without a third world war breaking out? To judge by best-sellers such as Aldous Huxley’s Ape and Essence (1948), Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957), and Walter Miller’s A Canticle to Leibowitz (1959), as well as the immense success of movies such as Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove (1964), almost no one.

Second, they have made the relevant international crises much more dangerous. Make the wrong move and, to revive a vintage Cold War phrase, poof goes “civilization as we know it.” Not as a matter of weeks, months or years, but within, say, a few hours of the button being pressed. For those who put their hope in anti-missile defenses, keep your hair on. Provided only such an attack is made with the right delivery vehicles and on a sufficient scale, no defenses existing today are capable of saving the country at which it is aimed.

*

As the above considerations show, the Russo-Ukrainian War is dangerous enough. Two scenarios can make it much more dangerous still. One is that Russia will win, presumably meaning that its armed forces will crush those of Ukraine, occupy Kiev and other key cities, do away with Zelensky and his government, put another, Russian or pro-Russian, one in its place, and annex parts of the country to Russia. Tired of the war and concerned about a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan, the US resigns itself to the outcome and ends its support for a government that no longer exists. Assuming the Russians, having paid a heavy price, know where to stop and do not exploit their victory in order to invade additional countries in Eastern Europe, e.g the Baltic ones, or Poland, or Moldavia, that is the optimistic scenario.

The pessimistic scenario is much worse. Under this scenario the Russian army either suffers a crushing defeat—a possibility which, given the gigantic size of the theater of war, appears unlikely—or starts disintegrating through incompetence, corruption, and the sheer reluctance of its troops to fight. The revolt of the Wagner Group, quickly suppressed as it was, may at any rate indicate that such a collapse is possible. The war comes to an end—either because Putin starts putting forward peace-proposals that Ukraine and NATO can accept or because his subordinates mount some kind of coup, remove him, and come up with similar proposals.

Either way, the danger is great that defeat will cause Russia to disintegrate. As the term Federation implies, Russia is anything but a unified country. Sources differ; however, the best estimate is that, out of a population of 144 million, just 103 million are Russian. Depending on one’s definition, the remaining 41 million comprise anything between 120 and 170 nationalities and ethnic groups. As events in Chechnya e.g during the 1990s showed only too clearly, some of these are only waiting for an opportunity to throw off Moscow’s yoke. Faced with such a scenario, whoever rules in the Kremlin, cornered and unwilling to watch his country disintegrate, will be tempted to turn to nuclear weapons—first by way of a warning, then perhaps against real targets—as his last resort.

*

To recapitulate, there are several ways to make a dangerous war more dangerous still. Arranged in order of increasing danger, the list starts with the disruption of communications and economic life and proceeds through escalation as additional countries join the fray. The most dangerous possibility of all is a total Russian defeat leading to the use, by Putin or whoever may replace him in the Kremlin, of nuclear weapons.

In which case, God help us all.

In the Middle East, the Alarm Bells are Ringing

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In the Middle East, the alarm bells are ringing. In this post I shall make an effort to explain, first, why this is so; and second, what a war might look like.

*

In the Middle East, the alarms bells are ringing. There are several reasons for this, all of them important and all well-able to combine with each other and give birth to the largest conflagration the region has witnessed in decades. The first is the imminent demise of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, alias Abu Maazen. Now 88 years old, his rule started in 2005 when he took over from Yasser Arafat. Unlike Arafat, who began his career as the leader of a terrorist organization, Abu Mazen was and remains primarily a politician and a diplomat. In this capacity he helped negotiate the 1995 Oslo Agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Movement. Partly for that reason, partly because he opposed his people’s armed uprising (the so-called Second Intifada of 2000-2003) some Israelis saw him as a more pliant partner than his predecessor had been.

It did not work that way. Whether through his own fault, or that of Israel, or both, during all his eighteen years in office Abu Mazen has failed to move a single step closer to a peace settlement. Israel on its part has never stopped building new settlements and is doing so again right now. As a result, Palestinian terrorism and Israeli retaliatory measures in the West Bank in particular are once again picking up, claiming dead and injured almost every day.

Nor is the West Bank the only region where Israelis and Palestinians keep clashing. Just a few weeks have passed since the death, in an Israeli jail and as a result of a hunger strike, of a prominent Palestinian terrorist. His demise made the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization in Gaza launch no fewer than a thousand rockets at Israel, leading to Israeli air strikes, leading to more rockets, and so on in the kind of cycle that, over the last twenty years or so, has become all too familiar. Fortunately Hezbollah, another Islamic terrorist organization whose base is Lebanon, did not intervene. It is, however, not at all certain that, should hostilities in and around Gaza resume, it won’t follow up on its leader’s threats to do just that. Certainly it has the capability and the plans; all that is needed is a decision.

Israel armed forces are among the most powerful in the world. In particular, its anti-aircraft, anti-missile, and anti-aircraft defenses are unmatched anywhere else. It may take time and here will be casualties. Still, unless something goes very, very wrong, Israel should be able to silence not just the Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah but another terrorist organization operating out of Gaza, i.e Hamas, too. If not completely and forever, then at any rate partially and for some time to come.

However, two factors threaten to upset this nice calculation. The first is the possibility that, as hostilities escalate, the Kingdom of Jordan will be drawn into the fray just as it was both during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and then during its 1967 successor. With Palestinians now comprising a very large—just how large no one, perhaps not even the Jordanians themselves, knows—percentage of the kingdom’s population, there is a good chance that the ruling Hashemite House will not be able to remain on the sidelines. Either it joins the fight, or it risks being overthrown.  Nobody knows this better than the Hashemites themselves. From the king down, not for nothing have some of them been buying property, including both real estate and stock, abroad. Currently Jordan is an oasis of stability and not at war with any of its neighbors. Should the regime fall and leave a behind failed state, though, it is likely that terrorists from all over the Middle East will flock to establish themselves there, setting off the powder keg.

The other possibility is more ominous still. Over the years Iran has been assisting various Middle Eastern terrorist organizations, providing them with money, weapons, logistics, training and more. In response Israel has been using its anti-aircraft defenses to bring down Iranian drones and its air force, to hit Iranian targets in Syria. As of today Iran lacks some of the elements that make up a modern air force, specifically including the all-important early warning systems. On the other hand, it does have the ballistic missiles and the drones it needs to reach and hit any Israeli target. Now Iran is a large country with 0.63 million square miles of land and a population of almost 87 million. Defeating it, if only to the extent of making it cease hostilities for the time being, will take more than just a few Israeli air strikes, however well planned, however precise, and however well executed.

*

To recapitulate, in the Middle East quiet, or as much of it as there is, is hanging by a thread. Israel, the occupied West Bank, the unoccupied Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Iran are all at imminent risk of war. Not just with each other but, in at least some cases, war combined with struggles against all kinds of terrorist organizations. As history shows, wars of the second kind are particularly likely to last for years and end, to the extent they ever do, in chaos. All this, before we even consider the role nuclear weapons, both those Iran may develop and deploy and those Israel already has, may play.

It Will Survive AI Too

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Over the last few months, the media have been positively bristling with so much hype about the coming AI Revolution as to make the heads of hundreds of millions spin. How it will completely upset the way things are produced and services, rendered. How it will increase productivity by anything between 40 and 1,200 percent (depending on whom you believe). How, it is “more powerful than Ukraine and Taiwan.” How it will upset the existing international order, assisting the US and India at the expense of China and Europe (Russia, apparently, does not count) and possibly saving the first-listed from what many people see as its imminent decline.

 

I am seventy-seven years old. I have never commanded a military formation, nor run a corporation, nor done research either in the natural sciences or in computing, AI included. In other words, my understanding of the issue is, let’s be charitable, limited. On the other hand, I feel that what little understanding I have of the way history works—an understanding I’ve been trying to acquire since I was ten years old—gives me some kind of handle when thinking about it. By way of a peg on which to hang my thought, I have chosen an article on the subject: S, Sharma, “8 Ways Artificial Intelligence (AI) Can Help You Improve Productivity.” The AI Journal, 9/1/2023, at https://aijourn.com/8-ways-artificial-intelligence-ai-can-help-you-improve-productivity/

So here comes Mr. Sharma’s list of some of the things AI is going to do.

1. “Forecast Demand Accurately.” As any student of economics can tell you, demand—here referring exclusively to commercial demand, not to every other kind—depends on many different factors. Technological developments, as when new gadgets, e.g steam engines or automobiles or computers, appear on the market. Prices, especially relative ones, that go either up or down. Macroeconomic developments. Changing circumstances, e.g droughts, global warming, or the emergence of epidemics such as COVID. Changing tastes, habits and ideas which cause the public to prefer one product over another. The discovery of new resources or the drying-up of old ones. The outbreak of war. Trends, luck, and fate (whatever that is). Some of these factors are foreseeable to some extent, others not. Some can be quantified and made computable, others not. All interact, forming a tapestry infinitely more complicated than anything that ever came off a loom. As result, for every correct vision there are ten incorrect ones. Briefly, the future is as much of a mystery today as it was 2,000 years ago when the Roman orator and lawyer Marcus Tullius Cicero discussed the problem with his brother Titus. Ironically Microsoft Bing, asked what the future would be like, first told me there were too many different scenarios to count and then invited me to submit my own.

2. “Automatic Text Creation.” This is already happening. Indeed multinational companies, in need of multilingual catalogues to sell their wares in different countries, have been using something like it for years. However, as anyone with experience in the matter can tell you, the outcome is likely to be both error-prone and moronic. Error-prone, because the machine has no idea of what the words it manipulates actually mean and is therefore liable to come up with all kinds of absurdities. Moronic because, not having an idea, it strings them together on the basis of the order in which they have been arranged before. One is reminded of the story in Gulliver’s Travels where “the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labor, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study” by using a special table on which all the verbs, all the adjectives and all the verbs in all languages, written on rotating cubes, can be arranged into a text simply by turning a crank. And without in the least understanding what she (or he) has done, of course.

3. “Predict Maintenance.” With or without the aid of AI, predictions of maintenance requirements have been made for ages. At best, AI will make the process faster and more reliable. But I cannot help wondering whether AI will be able to come up with new and improved maintenance philosophies. If I am wrong, please let me know.

4. “Easy Data Extraction and Review.” This, too, has been done for ages. In fact every single ancient writing system known to us was designed specifically for that exact purpose. So in China, so in Mesopotamia, so in Egypt, so in the Aegean (Linear A), and so among the Inca (quipu). But whether General Motors e.g is better run today than it was at its heyday in the 1920s, long before computers and the current AI revolution, is doubtful. Why? Because demand adapts itself to the available supply. The more AI we have at our disposal the more complex and the more numerous the problems it is asked to resolve.

5. “Seamless interaction.” Attempts to achieve it, some successful, some not, have been going on for ages. The problem? Either changing external circumstances or the kind of human caprice known, euphemistically, as “the free will.” Or, not seldom, some more or less weird combination of both.

6. “Improve manufacturing processes.” This may be true, but it is certainly not new. As long as humans have produced anything—meaning, for the last few hundreds of thousands of years—they have also been trying to improve the production process. It worked: now slowly, now very fast.

7. “Automatic hiring.” AI may help employers go through the hiring process faster. However, often it does so only by making life for would-be employees much harder, as by having them fill far more questionnaires. All without any guarantee that things will work out better than they have done in the past or are doing now. For example, can anyone seriously argue that Julius Caesar was not as good in choosing his subordinates as George Marshal was?

8. “Social Commerce & Livestream Shopping.” This has been taking place at least since the first known cities, emerging some 5,000 years ago, set apart special spaces for—yes, you guessed it—“social commerce.” Indeed “commerce” itself stems from the Latin word cum, meaning “together.” AI may facilitated and extended it, but without changing anything really important.

Conclusion. In the words of Ecclesiastics “the thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” Mankind has survived the ice age when, if scientists got it right, at one point there were only 3,000-10,000 individuals left. It will survive AI too.

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When You Go to the Woman—Don’t Forget to Turn on Your Tape!

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This week something extraordinary happened in Israel. A thirty-something old man was acquitted of having committed rape—would you believe it? As if to make the story more unbelievable still, the alleged victim was 1. Eighty-two years old; and 2.  A Holocaust survivor. Which, in this country and many others, automatically gets her a halloo and turns each word she says into gospel truth.

To make things still worse for the accused, he was an Arab—and thus supposedly more likely than others to suffer from sexual deprivation and commit rape. So how did he and his lawyer get him off the hook? Very simple. It turns out that the couple had been in touch for some time, using the telephone to arrange trysts—more than one—and have sex. She even promised to pay him for visiting her. The tapes were produced in court, and that was that.

As a famous seventeenth-century English lawyer, Matthew Hale, once said, of all crimes rape is the easiest to accuse a man of and the hardest to refute. With this in mind, I decided to repeat my warning by reproducing the list of idiots I first put on this website on 6 July 2018. Who knows: by so doing, I might even be saving a man’s life or two.

Who is in danger?

Any man who Approaches women, for he will be accused of “sexual harassment” and worse; it is only a question of time.

Any man who Assists women, for he will be accused of “sexual harassment” and worse; it is only a question of time.

Any man who Associates with women, for he will be accused of “sexual harassment” and worse; it is only a question of time.

.Any man who Befriends women, for he will be accused of “sexual harassment” and worse; it is only a question of time.

Any man who Believes in women, for he will be accused of “sexual harassment” and worse; it is only a question of time.

Any man who Buys women a drink, for he will be accused of “sexual harassment” and worse; it is only a question of time.

Any man who Coaches women, for he will be accused of “sexual harassment” and worse; it is only a question of time.

Any man who Dances with women, for he will be accused of “sexual harassment” and worse; it is only a question of time.

Any man who Directs women, for he will be accused of “sexual harassment” and worse; it is only a question of time.

Any man who Employs women, for he will be accused of “sexual harassment” and worse; it is only a question of time.

Any man who Flirts with women, for he will be accused of “sexual harassment” and worse; it is only a question of time.

Any man who Gives women a lift, for he will be accused of “sexual harassment” and worse; it is only a question of time.

Any man who Greets women, for he will be accused of “sexual harassment” and worse; it is only a question of time.

Any man who Instructs women, for he will be accused of “sexual harassment” and worse; it is only a question of time.

Any man who Is alone with women, for he will be accused of “sexual harassment” and worse; it is only a question of time.

Any man who Jokes with women, for he will be accused of “sexual harassment” and worse; it is only a question of time.
Any man who Looks at women, for whatever reason, for he will be accused of “sexual harassment” and worse; it is only a question of time.

Any man who Offends women, in whatever way, for he will be accused of “sexual harassment” and worse; it is only a question of time.

Any man who Plays with women, for he will be accused of “sexual harassment” and worse; it is only a question of time.

Any man who Praises women, for he will be accused of “sexual harassment” and worse; it is only a question of time.

Any man who Shakes hands with women, for he will be accused of “sexual harassment” and worse; it is only a question of time.

Any man who Shows affection for women, for he will be accused of “sexual harassment” and worse; it is only a question of time.

Any man who Sleeps with women (apart from prostitutes, the only honest ones around), for he will be accused of “sexual harassment” and worse; it is only a question of time.

Any man who Studies women, for whatever purpose, for he will be accused of “sexual harassment” and worse; it is only a question of time.

Any man who Talks to women, for he will be accused of “sexual harassment” and worse; it is only a question of time.

Any man who Teaches women, for he will be accused of “sexual harassment” and worse; it is only a question of time.

Any man who Touches a woman, even accidentally, for he will be accused of “sexual harassment” and worse; it is only a question of time.

Any man who Treats women, whether for physical or psychiatric problems, for he will be accused of “sexual harassment” and worse; it is only a question of time.

Any man who Trusts women, for he will be accused of “sexual harassment” and worse; it is only a question of time.

Any man who Works alongside women, for he will be accused of “sexual harassment” and worse; it is only a question of time

*

Finally: When you visit the woman—das Weib is what the original German says—don’t forget to turn on your tape!

Head to Head

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Ukrainian Blouse

Russian Blouse

Like almost anyone living in the West today, I am exposed to a flood of media accounts practically all of which explain how good and bad, respectively, Zelensky/Ukraine and Russia/Putin are. Unlike many people living in the West today, I have my doubts about this picture. Which is why I decided to take a look, albeit a cursory one, into the origins of the conflict that is now threatening to escalate to the point where it takes the world apart.

I History and Politics

Before 600 BCE. The land now known as Ukraine, previously inhabited by horse-riding, nomadic or semi nomadic, tribes known to the Greeks as Scythians, was occupied by tribes later designated as East (as opposed to North and West) Slavs. They lived in fortified settlements which, however, were few, small and scattered all over the immense country.

860-62 CE. Some of the country was unified under a leader named Rurik. What information we have about him is contained in chronicles written centuries later and is therefore not very reliable. However, most historians believe that he and his “Rus” followers were of Scandinavian origin. The term, Rus, originating in Old Swedish, means “men who row.” This would be consistent with the idea that the invaders came by river.

870s. Rurik’s successor, Oleg, establishes Kiev as his capital. In the chronicles, which continue to serve as our main sources for the period, the polity he and his successors headed is known simply as “Rus” (and not as “Kiev Rus.”).

988. The rulers of Kiev, now headed by Volodymyr the Great, reach the Baltic for the first time.

12th century. Various Rurikid princes start intermarrying with the rulers of Muscovy, thus gradually leading to the establishment of Rurikid rule there as well

1187. The term “Ukraine,” meaning “borderland” or “march” is mentioned for the first time in the so-called Hypatian Codex; a compendium of three local chronicles originating in three separate “Rus” cities that is the most important source of historical data for those cities. The term “Ukraine” refers to the principality of Pereyaslavl, located east of Kiev. 

1250s. The Mongol invasions end the independence of Kiev. However, Rurik’s descendants continue to rule as vassal kings both in Kiev and Moscow.

1335. Yuri II Boleslav, the ruler of the RuthenianKingdom of Galicia–Volhynia (the latter, a province of Russia), signs his decrees Dux totius Russiæ minoris. (Duke of all Minor Russians), thus for the first time distinguishing “Great” Russians from “Little” (i.e. Ukrainian) ones.

1383. The Kiev Rus revolt and defeat the Mongols in the Battle of Kulikovo Fields. This marks the beginning of the Golden Horde’s decline.

15th century. Present-day Ukrainian territories come under the rule of four external powers: the remnants of the Golden Horde, the Crimean Khanate, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland. Of those the last two would later unite, forming a huge commonwealth that reached from the Baltic all the way to the northern shores of the Black Sea.

1480. The Grand Duchy of Muscovy, whose known origins go back to the first half of the fourteenth century, throws off Mongol rule and gains its independence. Moscow assumes its historical role as the capital of Russia.

1610. The last Rurikid Tsar, Vasily IV, dies. The first Romanov Tsar, Mikhail I, succeeds to the throne.

1648. A Ukrainian (Cossack) rebellion against Polish-Lithuanian rule jump-starts a century and a half process whereby the tables are reversed. Poland, instead of ruling vast stretches of Russia and Ukraine, ends in 1798 by being partitioned between Muscovy/Russia, the Habsburg Empire, and Prussia.

1721. The Grand Duchy of Muscovy declares itself the Russian Empire and Muscovites are proclaimed to be Russians.

1768-83. A series of Russo-Turkish wars, launched by Catherine the Great and commanded by Alexander Suvorov, extends Russian, rule right down to the Black Sea. The conquest gives Russia access to the Bosporus, thus immensely increasing the strategic importance of Little Russia (Malorussia), as Russians call Ukraine.

1918-21. Well aware of what they called “the nationality problem” Lenin, and under him Stalin, seek to solve it by dividing the newly-established Soviet Union into Republics enjoying (rather limited) autonomy. In 1919 the “All-Russian Central Executive Committee,” as the responsible organ was known, created the broad outline of the Ukraine-Russia border by including in Ukraine, roughly, the former Russian imperial provinces of Volhynia, Kiev, Chernigov, Kharkov and Ekaterinoslav. It based this decision on the 1897 census which showed a majority of Ukrainians in each of these districts.

1932-33. These are the years of the Holodomor, the Stalin-inspired and enacted collectivization of farmland which involved the deliberate starving-out of perhaps 10 percent of Ukraine’s population. Memory of the Holodomor is held up as perhaps the most important reason behind Ukraine’s separatism and the current war with Russia.

1941-44. “The Ukraine” as it is known, is occupied by the Germans for the second time in a quarter century. As in almost every other occupied country, the outcome was not insignificant cooperation between occupiers and occupied, with the latter striving towards independence and the former steering an uneasy compromise between encouraging local nationalism and trying to suppress it. Still hatred for Stalin may have led to more collaboration in Ukraine than in most other occupied Soviet districts. World War II over, armed skirmishes between the KGB and various Ukrainians groups continued and only ended about 1950.

  1. For reasons unknown, Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev transfers the Crimea from the Russian Republic to the Ukrainian one.

II Religion and Culture

867. The Patriarch of Constantinople, Photius, triggers the process that, over the next century or so, led to the Christianization of the “Rus” of Kiev

986. According to the Primary Chronicle, a document that covers the development of the Kievian “Rus” from about 850 to 1100, a Rurikid ruler known in Ukrainian as Volodymyr, in Russian as Vladimir, and in both as “the Great,” summons a conference to decide which religion he and his subjects should embrace, finally deciding on Eastern Christianity.

1299-1325. The Russian Orthodox Church moves its headquarters from Kiev, first to Vladimir, east of Moscow, and then to Moscow itself.

1325-1654. Various attempts to unite the Russian Orthodox Church with the Catholic one, imported from the West by way of Poland and Lithuania, were made but ended in failure. The process ended in 1654 when the Russian Church transferred its allegiance from Constantinople to Moscow, thus becoming autocephalous. Over the next two and a half centuries many senior “Russian” ecclesiastical posts were occupied by Ukrainians.

2022. As per a survey published by the Kiev International Institute of Society, 85% of Ukrainians identify as Christians. 72% call themselves Eastern Orthodox, 9% Catholics (8% Eastern-rite, 1% Latin-rite) and 4% Protestants or adherents of other Christian movement.

*

Russian and Ukrainian are similar, but they are not the same. Both grew out of Old East—as opposed to West—Slavonic. Their development into separate, though still closely related, languages started between 1,000 and 1,300 CE. While the Ukrainian alphabet is similar to the Russian one, it also comprises four unique letters to represent sounds specific to Ukrainian. The two languages are mutually intelligible, though often not without some effort. Partly as a result of having learnt it at school, Ukrainians are more likely to understand Russian than the other way around.

While it is always possible to find precedents—going back, in this ease, to the great 17th-century Cossack revolt against Poland/Lithuania—Ukrainian nationalism is mainly a product of the nineteenth century when country’s western provinces were strongly influenced by the Austrian empire. Much later this fact enabled Russian President Vladimir Putin to claim that it was not a native movement but an imported one.

In Ukraine as in other countries, initially nationalism was generated by a tiny urban elite of highly cultured literati by no means representative of the people as a whole. In Ukraine as in other countries, members of this elite sometimes went to the countryside in the hope of discovering and preserving “aboriginal” and “pure” traditions in which to anchor their views. In Ukraine as in other countries, some such traditions were invented almost ex nihil. Old or new, they provided people—mainly Russians, Ukrainians, and Poles—with additional reasons for fighting each other tooth and nail; nowhere more so than in the “Bloodlands” (historian Timothy D. Snyder) of Eastern Europe.

On the other hand, many famous “Ukrainian” (in the sense that they were born in Ukraine) writers actually wrote in Russian. Nikolai Gogol, the best-known “Ukrainian” writer of all, was born in Sorochyntsi, a Cossack village in what is now Ukraine’s Poltava Oblast, but wrote in Russian. The same applied to Anna Akhmatova and Isaac Babel (both from Odessa) and Mikhail Bulgakov (from Kiev). This list could easily be extended.

As per the latest census, 67 percent of Ukrainians use Ukrainian as their “native” language whereas 29 percent use Russian. Most Ukrainian speakers are concentrated in the west and center of the country; whereas Russian ones inhabit in a long arch that starts in the north, extends to the east, and ends in the south. Yet “native” does not necessarily mean day today, as many Ukrainians start using Russian either when they attend school—formerly, having to do so was part of Moscow’s attempts to Russify them—or, as adults, as part of normal social life. To add to the confusion, about 30 percent of the population use both languages interchangeably both at home and elsewhere.

III. The Current Crisis

The current crisis can be said to have originated in late 1989 when the East Block broke up. Since then both Russia and the West, the latter headed by the U.S, have been using all kinds of methods, fair and foul, to make sure Ukraine, a large and strategically very important country, should be on their side. Including, in 2014, the attempted assassination, probably by Putin’s agents, of a leading “Westernizer”, Viktor Yushchenkoof, who was then running for president. In 2019, the election as president of Volodymyr of Zelensky marked the West’s victory in this struggle.

On 9 February 1990, during a meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, then US secretary of state James A. Baker promised that NATO would not expand past the territory of the former East Germany. Speaking in Brussels on 7 May of the same year, NATO’s Secretary General Manfred Woerner repeated that promise. Whether either of these promises was ever put in writing is moot. Certainly they were not made the subject of any treaty.

1991. In February the Warsaw Pact, the chief instrument long used by the Soviet Union to dominate the countries of Eastern Europe (and threaten those of the West), is dissolved. In July-December 1991 the same fate overtakes the Soviet Union. Its place is taken by a “Commonwealth of Sovereign Republics” of which, Russia apart, Ukraine is the largest and most populous. With Kiev as its capital, Ukraine for the first time in history becomes a unified country separate from Russia and under its own independent government. Reflecting the change, the term “Ukraine” takes over from “The Ukraine.”

1997-2004. A number of East European countries, emerging from the Soviet-dominated East Bloc, apply to join NATO and are accepted. To justify this expansion, it is claimed that the promises made by Baker and Woerner did not apply to the new circumstances. In 1997 then Russian President Boris Yeltsin personally expressed his unhappiness with NATO’s eastward expansion, calling it a “threat” to Russians security. Using less restrained language, subsequent Russian spokespersons have spoken of a Western “betrayal.” To Vladimir Putin, who assumed the presidency of Russia in 2000, his country’s collapse is the greatest disaster it has ever sustained and he vows to reverse it. The outcome is a series of relatively small wars: in Chechenia, in Georgia, and in Dagestan.

2014. The Donbas, which is part of Ukraine but has proportionally more Russian speakers than any other Ukrainian region, breaks into civil war, causing Putin to intervene on the Russian side. Other Russian forces seize a corridor from the Donbas to the eastern shores of the Black Sea and from there to the Crimea, which they occupy. This makes alarm bells ring not just in Ukraine but all over Eastern Europe as well as NATO.

2020. By then not only the signatories of the Warsaw Pact but all East European countries, including the newly-established Baltic ones, have joined NATO. The number of NATO members has gone up from 12 in 1949—the year it was founded—to 31. More than one Russian spokesman has said that the “betrayal” is part of a Western plot whose ultimate goal is to dismantle Russia altogether.

Meanwhile the distance between Moscow and its western security border has gone down from 2,000 kilometers during the Cold War to a mere 1,000 today. Should Ukraine’s request to join NATO be granted it will be down to just 850—rather less than it was in 1941 when Hitler attacked.

2021. As preparations for accepting Ukraine into NATO go ahead Russian’s leadership, President Vladimir himself included, repeatedly warns that their country is not going to accept such a move laying down.

2022. On 24 February Russia invades Ukraine. All hell breaks loose, without an end in sight.

Conclusions

Almost as far back as anyone can look, the histories of Russia and Ukraine have been closely intertwined. Now it was Kiev that was the senior partner, now—definitely since about 1500—it was Moscow. Culturally the two nations (a term used by the Russians, but denied by the Ukrainians) are both similar and different. The greatest difference is religion, followed by language.

Concerning the present crisis, the most important factor behind it are 1. The collapse of Russia’s western security zone; and 2. NATO’s eastward drive which Russians see, not without reason, both as a threat in itself and as a possible prelude to an effort to dismantle their country.

With rare exceptions—Sweden in 1905, Czechia in 1992—states are not in the habit of letting parts of their dominions go without a fight, often a very bloody one. Specifically, I am not aware of any great power allowing the zone between its security-border and its capital to be cut by over half without engaging in massive bloodshed. Not ancient Assyria. Not Babylon, not Persia, not Athens, Sparta and Rome. Not China. All used might and main to crush would-be separatists, sometimes with success, sometimes not. More recently, the same applied to Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, and the Netherlands. The South’s attempt to secede led to the Civil War, AKA the War of Northern Aggression, which resulted in as many dead as did all of America’s remaining ones combined. As early as 1833, with a population of only 13,000,000 (including 2,000,000 slaves) the U.S had the unheard-of effrontery of claiming the entire Western hemisphere as its exclusive stamping ground.

I know: It is mostly power and interest, not justice and morality, which govern relations between nations and states. So it has always been, and so it will always remain. But I think that what we can do, and what I myself have been trying to do in this essay, is get rid of some of the ira et studio. Both of the lies and the idea that one side is completely right and the other, completely wrong. Whatever else, doing so may make reaching some kind of agreement that much easier.