We are haunted by ghosts - and Vladimir Putin's sickly dreams Ian McEwan

[Uncle Joe]

Here we are, in our ringside seats at a bloody circus, watching on TV and Twitter, trapped between infinite pity and rational self-interest. The tension between two opposing forces is unbearable. Pulling from one side, our horror at a senseless invasion, our wonder at the Ukrainian resistance, the unarmed villagers mobbing a Russian tank or feeding a captured Russian conscript sobbing as he is allowed to phone his mother, and our sorrow at the sight of terrified children in the bunkers huddling against their parents while their towns are destroyed; and from the other, waiting outside Kyiv, the 40-mile column, which we know could be destroyed in an afternoon by satellite-guided cruise missiles and stealth jet fighters invisible to radar.

The unlockable buckle restraining the west is fear of nuclear war, and Vladimir Putin, elevated into a deranged and unpredictable adversary, has played us well. So we are strapped in place by a bluff we dare not call, expert watchers with the mouse clicks and screen swipes, and in our communal anguish, incapable of much beyond sanctions and arms donations, alms and fulminations.

At each stage of the long Russian buildup of forces around Ukraine’s borders it was Putin’s privilege to call the next move and the west’s to respond, which, game theorists will insist, is weak play. The strong hand first seeks cooperation, then, when failing to get it, comes back hard with raised stakes. But Nato is not a single player, it’s a crowd of 30; and when groups make decisions, they tend to moderation. There are ghosts in the circus ring. In 1914, European nations protested peace as they “sleepwalked” into war. They got there by slow steps, unhindered by nightmares of nuclear winter. Now we are forced to interpret the tainted neural processes of one man and his sickly dreams. This is the ultimate “madman” sanction in nuclear tactics; if you cannot rely on your opponent to act logically to his own advantage, you are frozen in place, waiting for his next move, unable to take risks by direct intervention.

There are younger ghosts in the ring in the form of Grozny, Aleppo and Idlib. There the Russian calculation was to destroy from the air hospitals, triage clinics, residential blocks and schools in order to demoralise the population. In Ukraine, as Russian troop movements falter, the same cruel tactics are beginning to be repeated. There has always been a special dispensation for artillery units denied to “poor bloody infantry”. As they lob their shells across the landscape with fine regard for the mathematics of parabolic curves, artillery soldiers need never look into the eyes of a dying child. The same goes for guided missiles, and for bombs “aimed” from military planes. Murder at one remove is a simpler, more abstract crime.

(snip)

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/05/vladimir-putin-ukraine