Despite philosophic warnings that those who do not remember their history are bound to repeat it the majority today continue to forget theirs. These days, for instance, we are repeating what occurred during an interwar period summed up by the word ‘appeasement.’

European nations during the nineteen thirties sought to avoid a confrontation with Hitler by entering into weak diplomatic agreements whereby the wish of a megalomaniac for a greater Teutonic empire was gratified, for example, by the parcelling off of lands from the Sudetenland and the eventual gobbling up of Czechoslovakia. Today a parallel phenomenon is occurring in central and Eastern Europe. Nations appeased the Russian dictator by not interfering as far as his invasions of Chechnya, Georgia and Crimea were concerned. Putin did not even wait for any appeasement attempt before invading Ukraine. There was no ‘piece of paper’ to tear up here since no diplomatic accord was ever reached. Hence there was no obligation for the UK to declare war on Russia from that Cabinet Room in Ten Downing Street. Hitler’s invasion of Poland, in concurrence with Russia’s, came under the name of ‘border rectification’ and the current invasion of Ukraine is called by its perpetrator, a ‘military operation’.

Are we going to wait until the Kremlin’s plans for a ‘Greater Russia’ develops into interference with the Baltic States – in other words a direct confrontation with members of the European  Union (which, one may recollect, was set up with the prime objective of keeping the peace)?

One thing is certain: those who do not know the history of Russia – the history of a nation whose colonial empire (like the former German one) did not lie overseas but next door do not realise that they do things rather differently in that country Everything there appears to be on a much more colossal scale whether it  be novel-writing, symphonic composition, railway construction and, above all, human suffering – as agonised principally in the rise of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian famine, the Great Patriotic War and the Gulag Archipelago.

(Stalingrad 1942, Mariupol 2022)

I remain cautioned and my increasing preoccupation rests sadly unappeased by any convincing effort towards the avoidance of a truly possible start to Word War Three.