Russia

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.

‘Every way of a man is right in his own eyes’, the Book of Proverbs says: it makes us feel good to know we’re on the side of the angels. The corollary is that other men must be in the wrong, and therefore blameworthy, and this shores up our self-regard still further. Of course, taken to extremes, the outcome is full-blown narcissism. But in certain schools of international relations, there’s a kind of especially vigorous anti-narcissism in fashion: the idea that when it comes to the sins of the world, ‘we’ in the west are almost always the guilty party (excepting those enlightened enough to perceive this truth). Ukraine is the latest conflict where self-flagellants flex a version of the argument.

The beginning of the year has not gone as well as it could have for Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Mostly because he is now dead, but also because Zhirinovsky, a Russian politician of the “managed” (pro-Kremlin) opposition, predicted and vigorously supported Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. If Zhirinovsky were able to follow the campaign from his hospital bed, it could not have met his expectations. The imperial Russia of his imagination ought to have come into glorious existence, but its armed forces instead suffered reversal and humiliation. Zhirinovsky was the long-time leader of the Russian Liberal Democratic Party — a grouping that, as many wags have separately concluded, was under his leadership neither liberal nor democratic nor, in some lights, a party.