Putin

'We are used to death,’ said Ismail. He had been to the funerals of four friends in a single week, all killed by aerial bombs. ‘We’re used to bloodshed. We’re adapted to the situation and this style of life now. It’s normal. If you lose someone, then the next day you say, OK, life must go on.’ Ismail spoke to me from eastern-Aleppo, where as many as 250,000 people are under siege by the Syrian regime and ‘living on rice’, as he described it. He is in his late twenties and is one of the White Helmets, the civil defence volunteers who dig people out of the rubble after an attack. He could not endure the despair on the faces of the injured who knew they would not survive, he said.

I have just returned from one of the world’s most secretive states. I had to apply for a visa a month beforehand and send in a copy of my passport. There is no way into this place by road; you have to arrive on an authorised boat and a policeman checks your visa against your passport before you board. Private boats must keep well offshore and may not land. The visa is valid for only three nights; you have to book each night in advance and may not spend more than one night in the same place. Only ten visas are granted a day. Women have always been forbidden here — this rule remains strictly in force. A secretive body of Elders governs here and all citizens are bound to total obedience.

Julian Assange still has not found the courage to face the women who accuse him of sexual abuse. Rather than try to clear his name, he has sat in the basement of the Ecuadorian embassy in Knightsbridge for four years – a confinement long enough to drive most of us out of our minds. If Assange has lost his wits, however, there is a method to his madness, as there was long before he received what paltry hospitality the Ecuadorian diplomatic corps could offer him. Nothing he leaks has ever hurt Russia. He will denounce and expose human rights abusers, as we all should. But he will never allow his followers to learn of the suppression of democracy and human rights by Putin’s forces within and without Russia’s borders. Human rights in Assange’s mind are shape shifters.

The Baltic states do not feel like a front line. I did not see a police officer in more than a week in Latvia, let alone a soldier. Somewhere out there were three NATO battalions, deployed to deter Putin from crossing the border. But if it wasn't for the seediness that lingers like a bad smell - the occasional Brezhnev brutalist building and the memorials to the murdered Jews - I could think myself in a European country that had never experienced the twin curses of Nazism and communism. The art nouveau architecture is as fine as any you will see in Paris or Barcelona, and covers many more streets. There are Italian restaurants everywhere. People looked a little bewildered when I said I wanted to try Latvian dishes. What were they? Lentils? Sausages?

At a luncheon to mark a thawing of relations between Turkey and Russia this week, the diners were given a particular treat. I'm not talking about Beluga caviar, though it may have been on the menu, but rather the special crockery bearing the image of each country's presidents set out at each placing. The idea of having Putin and Erdogan beaming at me from ceremonial plates doesn't appeal hugely, but it seems to have set some of my Turkish colleagues off in raptures. For them the 'bromance' is back on. I'm not so sure. The plates were commissioned to mark a meeting between the two men in June 2015.

For the frontline in a Cold War which has been rapidly heating up in recent years, Narva certainly does not look it. The small Estonian town on the border with Russia has a mainly ethnic Russian population, settled after the Soviet Union annexed Estonia at the end of the Second World War. However the closest (and potentially most lethal) thing to a Russian machine gun nest I could find is the 24 hour burger van next to the border post, complete with a suitably surly staff. But is Narva’s ethnic Russian population a potential fifth column as tensions across the border with Nato increase? 'The old babushkas in Narva are getting tired of being asked about it,' Hannes Hanso, Estonia’s Defence Minister says in his offices in Estonia’s capital, Tallinn.

As many people have pointed out, if someone had awoken from a coma after 30 years and learned that one US political party was in thrall to Wall St and the other to Russia, they would be confused by 2016. But then right is the new left and liberalism, being the prestige faith, is bound to attract prestige people, while Russia is back to its pre-Bolshevik role as the great force for reaction. Some Democrats even believe that Donald Trump is in the pay of the Kremlin, although, then again, more than half of Democrats believe 9/11 was an inside job. This may all be a smear, but Trump has given off alarming signals, including promises to withdraw American forced abroad; Putin would surely welcome his victory. This is saddening.

The city of Palmyra, recently liberated from Isis, has seen a return to civilisation and culture with a performance by a Russian orchestra. The concert, conducted by a 'close associate' of Vladimir Putin, was of course a propaganda exercise - but what a propaganda exercise! It fills me with genuine sadness that no western power would ever think to pull such a stunt, and this reflects a deeper problem with our foreign policy; that is, what are we promoting?