It was all going so well, & then came the 24th February… — As far back as 1947 George Kennan had rightly identified what he called the “innate antagonism between capitalism and socialism.” He said that this concept had become deeply embedded in the foundations of Soviet power, and that it had profound implications for Russia’s behaviour on the international stage. He said…

How a distorted, repetitive past dictates the future in Russia, & how a reckoning with those distortions could change everything… — “Because Russia never had its own version of Nuremberg, this history was never officially corrected. Only a few years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, public opinion turned nostalgic for Stalinism. Whereas in Germany it was unthinkable after World War II to declare a longing for the days of…

Putin preaches a fascist ideology to an oblivious Russian population, who then parrot fascist insults at Ukrainians they call Nazis… — “We have the great moral right to be principled and insistent in defending our positions, because it was our country that bore the brunt of the fight against Nazism…The young people of today are the heirs of the true freedom fighters…We will always be faithful to their valour, and that…

A deep irony underpins Putin’s messaging, one that is entirely lost on the Russian people… — In Russia, nothing is more dangerous than the appearance of weakness. Peter Stolypin, Third Prime Minister of Russia; assassinated in 1911. In the early months of 2000, Secretary of State, the late Madeleine Albright became the first senior U.S. …

After the appalling treatment of Judge Ketanji Jackson by Republican members of the Judiciary Committee, & the staunch defence of her provided by Sen. Cory Booker, her confirmation as the first black, female Supreme Court Justice is a triumph. Wins such as this for the black community are few & far between, & ride on the backs of many who came before, leaving behind a legacy of wisdom & a vision for unity that still resonates decades after their passing.

Zelenskyy, like Churchill before him, has responded to overt aggression from a warlike dictator, to become the very enemy the dictator did not want to face. — With comments that presaged many 20th and 21st Century conflicts, including Vietnam, Rhodesia, Chechnya, Iraq, Russia-Afghanistan, NATO-Taliban, as well as perhaps the current Russia-Ukraine war, the great British wartime leader Winston Spencer Churchill was clear-eyed about the immense difficulties of putting down a motivated “liberation” insurgency replete with local geographical…

Much has been written of Vladimir Putin’s attachment to historical context in his pursuit of his war against Ukraine. Turkey should keep this mind when dealing with Putin’s revanchist Russia. — In 1711 as Peter the Great, newly married, set off to face a marauding Ottoman army led by Grand Vizier Baltaci Mehmet Pasha which was racing across Ukraine towards the Danube, he emblazoned his banners with Constantine the Great’s motto, “By this sign shall you conquer!”

As NATO, the E.U. and the U.S in particular, attempt to limit the fallout from Putin’s war against Ukraine, is he already working behind the scenes to undermine fledgling African democracies with a view to further destabilising the West and promoting the rise of new, ever more violent autocratic regimes across the continent? — Back in what Vladimir Putin might call the ‘good old days’ of Soviet Imperialism he found himself posted by the KGB to what was ostensibly an East German backwater in Dresden. It was, however, 1985 and the USSR was already ailing; the proverbial ‘sick man of Europe’ in waiting. …

As Putin outlaws public dissent in Russia & gags foreign journalists, is it too little too late to stem the growing tide of Russian revulsion at this war? — Is the unthinkable about to happen in Russia? Is what Putin had called ‘ the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the (20th) Century’ about to happen again in the 21st Century? The truth is, of course,no one knows. Trying to discern what is going behind Putin’s growing iron curtain MkII is…