RUSSIAN POLITICS - ONE

I am married to a Russian woman, speak Russian and have contacts in St Petersburg, Russia.

The attack by Russia on the Ukraine seems to be a harbinger of a deeper problem which we have ignored for far too long : Sixty percent world's population lives in democracies and the rest live under dictators. Little has been contributed to the common good by dictatorships - they live and benefit from advances made elsewhere and contribute little from their own resources. From time to time their empty authoritarianism causes conflicts to erupt.

RUSSIAN POLITICS - TWO

If you just go visiting in Russia the people seem to be interchangeable with any other educated population.

Delving deeper, however, you soon find that they have no understanding of the concept that a government is there to serve the people and not the other way round. I think there are three main reasons for this:

Firstly there is distance. In most European countries you can walk to the capital in a few days gathering a mob as you go and bring direct pressure on the government. In Russia the distances are vast. From Vladivostok to Moscow is over 6500 km direct or more than 9000 km on the road. You can't walk it. Then, there is the propaganda. In the democracies there are journalists who take delight in rooting out the deficiencies and peccadillos of the rulers. In Russia there are no such journalists - only craven mouthpieces for the government. Finally, the government controls the communication systems - the phones are tapped, the internet is monitored, encrypted systems like Telegram are subjected to deciphering attempts, and where that doesn't work, the users are identified and pressurised.

Add to this a psychopathic leader...

PUTIN

Vladimir Putin seems to me to embody the essence of a man suffering from advanced autocratonoia.

This disease is not diagnosable in its early stages because those who go on to suffer it are, in middle age, usually very determined and successful chief executives of countries : presidents or prime ministers. Then, after about seven years, a change starts to set in. They start to think that as they are so good at the job it really would be better for everyone if they stayed on and continued doing the good work. They shouldn't, they think, let the small matter of re-election spoil their increasingly impeccable record so they bully the election officials, who probably try to call in lawyers. Easy, change the law. A few years later they they come to think that they don't need advice so they put yes-men in all the influential positions... You know the rest. Putin has got it bad.

WHAT'S TO COME ...

It will take some sort of miracle to prevent Putin over-running the Ukraine. Russia has a population of 100 million to Ukraine's 40 million. Russians have just as good brains as anyone else. Soon, in spite of Putin's tactical meddling, the armed forces will get rid of the armchair marshals and give command to younger and more experienced battlefield-savvy officers.

In any case, Putin cannot afford to lose. He will double his bets and double them again until he wins. If he has to use a nuclear weapon then he will do so.

Putin will not stop at the Ukraine. He wants to force the area of influence back to somewhere near that of 1980. Putin, to justify his war, has invented the idea that the West wants to conquer Russia. He says that NATO is trying to surround his country and that Nazis run the Ukraine.

I lived all through the cold war era and during all that time I never, ever, heard anyone, politician or layman, say that we should overrun Russia. You can't "surround Russia" - look at a map. Everyone knows that we could not occupy Russia let alone administer its vast land mass.

The one thing we did understand was the intolerant hatred of the Nazi mind. The only Nazis around at the moment are in the Kremlin