Humanity, it seems, can only play these same games over time, the power and glory, the winner takes all, the brinkmanship and the rhetoric.
In a call today with a client in Romania, a super-tough, super-clever lady, I asked her how it felt from there, and she said ‘it isn’t close and it’s also very close’ and her expression was one of horror.
There is something sickeningly familiar about the current groundswell of stories — from initially isolated foreign analyses to now the lead on most news services in the world — on a global disaster looming.
Two years ago, that same groundswell was about Covid-19. Today, it is about the chances of Russia and NATO going to war.
To be clear, the threat is of Russia plus China versus the US plus Europe, in a piece of unfolding history over where the borders of Russia really end in the post-Soviet era. How far can it be rolled back? How much will it resist and reclaim?
Humanity, it seems, can only play these same games over time, the power and glory, the winner takes all, the brinkmanship and the rhetoric.
Yet, how many of us are now trying to gauge just how far the madness might go this time, and whether anyone might remember that no-one wins from an apocalyse.
In a call today with a client in Romania, a super-tough, super-clever lady, I asked her how it felt from there, and she said ‘it isn’t close and it’s also very close’ and her expression was one of horror.
She then began winding her hair around her fingers, in an out-and-out marker of anxiety: she looked completely spooked. Of course, maybe something else stressful was going on for her, apart from war breaking out between the world’s biggest superpowers just a few hundred miles from her home.
Yet, as Russian President Vladimir Putin points out he has more nuclear warheads than Europe and, his words, it wouldn’t take a second from when NATO triggered Article 5 (which is when every member collectively moves to defend a member under attack), what are we supposed to hear?
Definitely, living in a neighbouring country is far too close right now, as is living almost anywhere in Europe.
For, will he, won’t he, can he, and what next, with his 147,000 troops amassed along the Ukrainian border?
If this really is a step and a hop from nuclear Holocaust then there’s nothing any of us can do about it, because we’re gone.
And that’s Kenya too, despite being only one of four named countries thanked by Russia for its support against NATO’s position on Ukraine.
For, if missiles fly, radiation respects no borders, nor seas — like the Fall Armyworm that blew into West Africa from South America. It won’t say: ‘Oh no, we won’t go to Kenya’.
More than that, Europe’s pain, Russia’s, China’s and America’s are the pain of the whole world, and Kenya too, when Mombasa Port sits empty and the planes at JKIA have nowhere to fly to.
Yet it isn’t the nuclear threat and annihilation that feels as if it is now opening its gaping jaws. For sure, this isn’t a good time to see how rationally our world’s leaders behave in the face of mass hysteria, when they closed nearly all our economies for an inflated respiratory flu.
But war these days isn’t firstly about annihilation: it’s about cyberwar and disinformation. Russia knocked out Ukraine’s infrastructure in 2015, hacking its power systems.
But when it launched a bigger cyberattack, in 2017, it had the Fall Armyworm problem – the virus didn’t stop at Ukrainian borders and even infected computers in Russia, with which Ukraine still has many of its closest practical ties.
However, that was a few years back, and some parties have been practising ever since. Last month, most of Ukraine’s government websites went down. The European Central Bank has warned all the continent’s banks to baton down.
So just remember how it felt that day WhatsApp disappeared for hours, or when Google goes, or Facebook. Now have that be your bank, all ATMs off, all its core systems down, and all transfers suddenly evaporated. Do we lose the global Internet backbone now? Do we lose electricity, oil, phone networks, and office software?
We are tired now, after Covid, and many things have closed, some modernity is lost. Will we really have to lose most of the rest to get Russia’s borders agreed? Or can our leaders stop the drama now and hold the peace talks ahead of this war?
