Rafael Behr: The age of levity is over. The Russia-Ukraine war will shake politics into a new sobriety / Owen Jones: Putin’s aggression makes clear the case for an anti-war movement
Western conviction that this is not supposed to happen in Europe any more has not stopped it happening. The shock is producing dramatic policy changes across the continent. The past has invaded the present. Russia’s military aggression has burst over Ukraine like a storm cloud gathered from a different, darker time. It is raining terror and destruction on a country that has seen tank columns like the one Vladimir Putin has ordered to Kyiv before, but not in the last seven decades.
Opposition to Putin's war is alive on Moscow's streets. But not on Russian TV
Nesrine
Malik: Let Ukraine open our eyes to the suffering of war around
the world
The Kremlin claims to be landing surgical strikes. The reality for civilians on the ground is butchery. Until this happened, the western imagination struggled to process the idea that Putin would go through with it. His cynical disregard for human life was never doubted, but his callousness was thought to include rational self-interest. Compassion was not going to stop the Russian president unleashing hell, but maybe some other calculation would impose restraint – the prospect of economic ruin, or of losing the support of ordinary Russians who have no boiling grievance against Ukrainians.
But success at domestic repression and years of international equivocation have convinced Putin that brutality works. I was in Chechnya in 2003, covering a Kremlin-rigged referendum to formalise the breakaway republic’s reabsorption into Russia. Grozny was still a smouldering ruin. The polling stations were empty. The only way to distinguish empty rubble from functioning homes was by the words “people live here” daubed on the bricks. That is what victory looks like for Putin.
And still, people thought the Kremlin’s capacity for violence had some psychological limit; that it could be checked by an invisible force field of diplomacy or economics. The Russian line that Ukrainians need rescuing from their own government – that their sham nation wants dissolution into a greater Slavic motherland – sounded like some grotesque pastiche of a 20th-century dictator. But there was still doubt as to whether Putin actually believed that stuff. The question was answered when he reached the page in the fascist playbook where tanks fire on children...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/01/russia-ukraine-war-politics-europe-britain
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Theses on the Proliferation of Egocrats (1977)
Owen Jones: Putin’s aggression makes clear the case for an anti-war movement
The coffers of our governing party are flush with Putin-linked cash. “Donors who have made money from Russia or have alleged links to the Putin regime have given £1.93m to either the Conservative party or individual Conservative associations since Boris Johnson took power in July 2019.” Putin’s Russia has been one of several human rights-abusing recipients of British arms sales. When Nigel Farage – like so many of his rightwing populist brethren declared his admiration for Putin, was he really so far outside the mainstream?
An economic model forged by Thatcherism transformed London into one of the world’s premier tax havens and a hub for “dirty money” from Russia and other human rights abusers: no wonder so many oligarchs have snapped up real estate in London and the home counties. From football clubs to newspapers to tennis matches with our now prime minister, it’s no exaggeration to describe the Russian and British elites as profoundly entangled...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/02/putin-aggression-anti-war-movement-ukraine
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/02/putin-aggression-anti-war-movement-ukraine
Ukraine:
India refuses to take a clear position on the Russian invasion
