Tsar Vladimir...

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Once again, European history appears to be turning on the Baltic. As we hear daily of Russian crimes against Ukrainian civilians, so the Baltic States are, in tandem with Western European countries, radically increasing their own defence spend and support matériel for Ukraine. Estonia in particular, a country with a population approximately that of Birmingham, UK, has sent $200M worth; and was indeed the first nation to send such support.

The criticality - aligned along NATO's Forward Presence - lies between Estonia in the North and Poland to the South, with Latvia and Lithuania in between; the Russian satellite of Kaliningrad being isolated between Poland and Lithuania by the Suwalki Gap. Today's news of the discovery of a mass grave of civilian bodies apparently executed by retreating Russian troops adds further to the pressure on Western governments and NATO itself to respond to what are manifestly crimes against humanity. This is, it seems, the return of history - post-Neo-Liberal-Democracy-Fantasy-Land - and as usual, mankind fails to learn from that history and move on from the mean tribalism that has beset us all throughout it.

There are important differences between the then of both the First and Second World Wars, and the current potential Third World War that some envisage as the potential outcome from all of this. The First War was effectively an internecine squabble between European Royal dynasties [I simplify quite a bit], and the Second was principally Hitler's deranged attempt at turning the tables in the aftermath of the First War and the subsequent Allied reparations levied on Germany [similarly simplified].

This one, though, if it escalates into a Third, will simply be one of naked, unwarranted and unneeded territorial expansionism by a deluded Russian President in search of his country's Imperial past, fuelled partly by his relatively-recently adoption of Russian Orthodoxy and pre-Soviet culture. As a country, Russia's gas fields are a major component of their prosperity - the number of stupidly-rich oligarchs in Putin's orbit are testimony to that - so national economic want, as in Post First War Germany - doesn't exactly apply, and there ain't no active extant Royals to stir the pot there. A longing for a spurious and fictive Imperial and Colonial superiority - in Putin's paranoid vision - does...

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