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Opinion | Ukraine crisis: is there reason to be optimistic about peace?
- On the matter of Russia and Ukraine, Beijing has been notably careful not to endorse any invasion
- It is Washington that should stop taking a dim view of countries with national interests different from its own
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Regarding the Ukraine crisis, suppose I were not the sunny optimist I try to be but, instead, a dark pessimist always anticipating the worst?
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Consider Russian President Vladimir Putin. Just try to stay optimistic after reading the depressing but immensely useful book, Mr Putin: Operative In the Kremlin. More than 500 pages, published by the Brookings Institution years ago, the book by Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy is a sprawling portrait of evil. As such, it caught the eye of high-level people in the US foreign policy establishment.
Putin, a former Soviet intelligence operative, comes across as a man so manifestly wired for no good that he could make Niccolo Machiavelli look like the second coming of a teenage environmentalist.
What a package: nurtured in the shadows of the KGB over a 16-year career. Canny blackmailer. Conniving for years to suck Ukraine into the big belly of Mother Russia. Patient plotter of anti-West warfare, whether via assaults by tank or technology. Master of political multiplicity. “Since 2000, Mr Putin has been the ultimate international political performance artist,” write Washington insiders and co-authors Gaddy and Hill.
Hill, a widely respected US National Security Council official for the Russian and European portfolio now replanted at Brookings, surfaced dramatically in the 2019 House impeachment hearings of president Donald Trump. She was a star witness.
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That’s the reason I found my way to her tome and started to wonder whether a pessimist might make better sense of what will happen next in Ukraine than an optimist. It turns out that I am not the only reader who found his way to that book.
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