Russia

My favorite spy movie cliché of all time is the secret agent stuck in the 1980s. The threats have gone asymmetrical, terrorists slip across borders, but our hero longs for the simple days when the world was divided between good Westerners and bad Russians. “You’re a fossil!” sneer his girlboss department administrator, his vegan drone pilot, his tech whiz who has just hunted down a non-state actor by crosschecking the latest SIGINT with a Yelp! review of an Iraqi yoga studio. Cut to him muttering under his breath à la Judi Dench in Casino Royale: “Christ, I miss the Cold War.” Now, suddenly, those who miss the Cold War are having a moment.

Nobody knows how long people live in Dzerzhinsk – life expectancy statistics for the Russian city, 250 miles east of Moscow, aren’t released to the public. In the days of the Soviet Union, it was closed to outsiders and left off official maps, but those in neighbouring Nizhny Novgorod joked that residents must have purple skin and second heads because of the emissions from its secretive chemical weapons plants. In recent years, however, it has gained notoriety as one of the most polluted places on the planet, with a study after the fall of the Iron Curtain reporting locals usually died in their mid-forties.

The war in Ukraine is about to enter an even deadlier stage, one in which both Kyiv and Moscow will be tempted to apply more and more military might that could even draw in outside powers. The Battle for Donbas, with another battle raging for what is left of the city of Mariupol, will be a new hell that Europe has not seen since the second world war. It has the potential even to mutate into World War III unless the conflict is brought to a conclusion — and fast. Why the war in Ukraine is shifting to these critical regions is simple to understand.

When Volodymyr Zelensky told the German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier yesterday that he did not want to see him in Kyiv, it hit his delegation like a slap in the face. The political class in Berlin still underestimates the depths of mistrust caused by Germany’s Russia policy. Whether trust with Eastern Europe can be rebuilt will depend on Berlin’s support for Ukraine – and certainly not on empty words, gestures and visits. Steinmeier had been on a state visit to Poland when Zelensky’s message reached him. He had travelled there in order to meet with President Andrzej Duda – in itself no easy encounter. Tensions between the two countries run higher than many in Germany realise.

In 1942, as Hitler’s forces swept through the Soviet Union, the Red Army went underground. Outside the city of Kerch in Crimea, 10,000 Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian soldiers dug into the caves of a limestone quarry, ready to defend their position to the last man. Intent on flushing them out, the Nazis bombed them from the skies, flooded the complex and, according to testimony from survivors, pumped noxious gas into the tunnels. That siege, 80 years ago, would have been the last time that chemical weapons were used in combat in Europe. Until, perhaps, yesterday. Just over 100 miles north of Kerch, in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, locals have reportedly complained of lung and ear problems after a drone dropped its payload overhead.

Last week, at roughly the time that photographs and stories began to filter out of liberated Bucha in Ukraine, the NGO Human Rights Watch published a report of similar massacres which took place contemporaneously in rural Mali. What linked the two was the identity of the perpetrators. In Ukraine and across Africa, these atrocities are committed by Russians. In combination with the Malian military junta, foreign soldiers "summarily executed an estimated 300 civilian men," in the town of Moura in late March. These soldiers did not speak French.

So much had been written about the Russian armed forces’ modernisation and improvement over the last decade that that it was widely believed that the Russians possessed one of the largest and most powerful armies in the world until a few weeks ago. The army might not be on par with the US or China, but it was certainly capable of conquering a military minnow like Ukraine – or so the logic went. The six weeks of war in Ukraine – which have seen Russian forces fail to take Kyiv and fall back elsewhere – has dented the army’s reputation. And now it seems that the Russian military may be running out of options in the rest of the country too.