Can Russia ever coexist with the West?

Seeing Vladimir Putin’s bloated face and listening to his increasingly unhinged rhetoric makes it tempting to assume that the current conflict in Ukraine is all about him. His actions and threats take Europe back not just to the 1930s, or even to the 1860s and Bismarck’s cold-blooded ‘cabinet wars’, but to the 1740s when Frederick the Great blatantly grabbed Silesia and set Europe ablaze. In attacking a peaceful sovereign country, Putin has regressed long before the United Nations Charter, and even before 1815, when the war-weary states that defeated Napoleon created a ‘Concert of Europe’ to keep the peace – with tsarist Russia one of the guarantors.

Quite mild-mannered people now express the hope that Putin might be ‘taken out’, and our problems thereby solved. Perhaps. But the real problem may be Russia itself. I don’t mean with its people. I’m not suggesting that there is some dark national psyche.