Bullets across the strait

On Europe’s eastern borderlands, trouble is brewing. Two headstrong leaders — Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Petro Poroshenko — both with authoritarian tendencies and both facing sagging popularity at home, have swapped trading insults for exchanging bullets across the Strait of Kerch.

The frightening truth is that war would suit both presidents’ short-term interests. Poroshenko faces re-election in March, and with his ratings running at 15 per cent he stands little chance of victory without a nation-uniting conflict to boost his standing. Putin, too, has seen his approval ratings sag from the 88 per cent he enjoyed in the aftermath of his annexation of Crimea in 2014 to 66 per cent after widespread protests over his plans to raise Russia’s pension age.

Of the two, it is Poroshenko who has most to gain from the exhilarating distraction of war. He presides over a chaotic and corrupt bureaucracy, which though less spectacularly kleptocratic than that of his predecessor Viktor Yanukovych nonetheless ranks a miserable 130th place among the 180 countries in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.