Making light of this is, of course, the privilige of someone who feels themself safe and the perogtive of fools: people are losing their lives as I write. Diary accounts of the early days of major events are always interesting for their lack of the retrospect, for their idiosyncratic slants and preoccupations that history will show to be irrelevant and historical accounts will airbrush away, so I only write this in the spirit of a contribution to the mass observation archive of internet ramblings. There’s actually plenty of other things I’d rather be doing if Voldemort hadn’t so rudely interrupted the news.
So in the spririt of showing myself to be an ass, I’ll make some deliberately left-field predictions based on no knowledge whatsover.
Prediction 1: This is a prediction made by my head in defiance of the dread I feel in the pit of my stomach: Russia will fail in Ukraine. I say this because I suspect that the average Russian really has no real interest in invading their neighbour. It is right to be skeptical of personalisng this conflict more than most, but I suspect it may be true in this case: this is Putin’s, rather than Russia’s war. Russia strikes me as somewhere where getting by is hard enough for most people and troops are essentially conscripts who couldn’t come up with a good case, or lacked the social strings, to get out of it. I just think that history showns that kids with limited prospects at home and no bone to pick with the ‘enemy’, generally lack the visceral commitment that I suspect is needed to really prosecute a war. IWinning wars is not about chess, it’s about harnessing hatred. How’s that for a bit of Home Counties, Sunday supplement-reading military strategizing? Nevertheless I commit it to writing. Time is Russia’s enemy – if it starts to drag, morale with wither, mothers will become upset when their children start coming back in bags. Meanwhile, nothing cements a nation’s identity so much as being invaded.
Prediction 2: complete leftfield prediction that no-one has made because they are informed and HCL is the sort of loon that phones into Any Answers (should be a good turnout this Friday) but: I predict this will be shown to be more about Eurasia than is acknowledged. The plan to restore something of the Eatsren bloc is, successful or not, going to blow any prospect of relations with the West (though Boris will doubtless try to offer them plenty of sweetners to continue putting their money through the London Laundromat). Any partial restoration of the Eastern bloc won’t be enough of an economic or military force to acheive the great-power bragging rights that seem to be the object of all this, so that leaves relations with the East.
There is, I beleive, a Russian perspective that sees Russia as more ‘naturally’ allied with the East, rather then Europe. There’s an neoligism that I can’t rmemeber – Russasia or somesuch. So is there a grand masterplan of putitng a buffer in the west so as so concentrate on the east? Not militarily, but economically? I haven’t thought this through (can you tell?), but I wonder… is this about a rivalrous alliance with China? On the basis of a really firm hold on the ‘Stans? Just a thought. lost. on. the. internet.
Dark days though.
