We know that Europe and the West are in a new Cold War with Russia, and like during the earlier East-West Cold War era from 1947 to 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, there are major costs to the new Cold War, destabilising and upsetting all countries in the West, including the USA, and also Russia itself and neighbouring countries in the East. There was a window of opportunity to create better East-West relations in the 1990s, but results were not achieved, which was a fault of both parties, since there were some signals that Russia wanted closer contact with Europe and a more Western-oriented development and perhaps more democracy at home. Whether the latter was actually the case may be questioned, because it would have required major changes within Russia and its old authoritarian political traditions, both before and after the Revolution in 1917.

Whatever it all was, it is too late now. Yet, it is also necessary at some stage in the future to look for a thaw and détente in East-West relations – to benefit the West as well as Russia. Currently, there is little hope, with Russia’s invasion war in Ukraine, now in its fifth year, with escalation rather than development towards peace, and it is over twelve years since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.

In a book entitled “The Border: A Journey Around Russia” (2017), anthropologist and travel writer Erika Fatland has documented that of all Russia’s 14 neighbours with whom it has land borders, it is only Norway that has never been attacked or had territory disputes. This means that Russia has an expansionist and aggressive way of thinking about its relations with its neighbours, indeed Ukraine, with which it ought to have good relations, not war. It even seems that Russia’s high loss of soldiers in the war with Ukraine has little effect on it, and we realise that Russia is a quite outdated country militarily and politically, far from having developed a democratic........

© The Nation