Parag, to start with–could you help set the context of what’s occurring in the world today? Is the war in Ukraine really that unprecedented or has it been a long time coming?
It’s a great question. The immediate term that comes to mind when we think of how this has come about is ‘frozen conflict’. Very often, we use this term to describe events like these; it could be Palestine or the South China Sea or other such political hotspots–because they haven’t exactly blown up recently, or they’re not blowing up in the news every day. We treat them as dormant. My attitude has always been that these frozen conflicts need to be aggressively tamed and resolved, because otherwise they remain powder kegs. That would be the logic I would apply to this; because clearly what you have here is a dilemma where it only takes one side to be unreasonable for the whole situation to be explosive.
So in a way, this conflict has remained unresolved for an extended period of time, and essentially it’s now come to a boiling point?
Exactly. For Putin-whether we’re talking about the Eastern provinces, Crimea or Ukraine’s relations with the West–all three things remain unresolved. They’ve been unresolved for about the last 20 years, quite frankly. That is as far as Putin is concerned. Essentially, what that comes down to is that this is one of those frozen conflicts we should have been much more aggressively seeking to resolve to begin with.
Are you surprised by the way things are panning out with the war as it stands?
I’m not surprised it’s blown up this way. Someone like Putin is always looking to poke and prod and undermine the West in many ways. We can only think back to his campaign on behalf of Trump and the US election [in 2016]. Or again, when there was Brexit or his invasion of Georgia. I mean, he’s actually been relentless
