THE FALLOUT
IN HOMER’S EPIC ODYSSEY, Ulysses, the legendary Greek king, while journeying on the Mediterranean, found himself caught between Scylla and Charybdis, two mythical sea monsters that inhabited the opposite shores of the Strait of Messina near Italy. He was advised to lose a few sailors to Scylla rather than surrender his ship and entire crew to the more-feared Charybdis. Aeons later, Russian president Vladimir Putin believed he was confronting a Ulyssean dilemma. A creeping effort by countries allied to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) to encircle Russia—a containment strategy unfolding over a span of three decades—posed an existential threat to his once-great nation. His choices? Either wage war on Ukraine, Russia’s immediate neighbour, which was keen to join the western alliance, or swallow the affront and watch Russia being treated as a pygmy in the emerging new world order.
Putin chose what he thought was the lesser of the two evils—subdue Ukraine before the western powers subdued Russia. Italian strategist Niccolo Machiavelli would have advised the same—“There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others.” So, on February 24, the Russian president launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, setting in motion the largest-ever land battle waged in Europe since World War II. As Russia’s massive armoured assault enters its second week, Putin’s motive becomes increasingly clear—total subjugation of Ukraine, including a regime change that would make it a vassal state of Russia as it was before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. He even threatened to go nuclear if NATO interfered in his war, ominously warning “of consequences you have never faced in your history”. There is every danger that a miscalculation on either side could push the world towards a catastrophic World War III, which former US defence secretary William Cohen says would result in “not just the end of history but of civilisation itself”.
WHY PUTIN WENT TO WAR
As the fighting raged in Ukraine, round one of the information war went to the West, with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, a comedian-turned-politician, hailed for his resilience and bravery in not abandoning ship. Putin, on the other hand, was accused of suffering delusions of grandeur, with some even comparing him to a demented King Lear. But is there a method to Putin’s seeming madness? There seems
