Warren Buffet said of the financial crash of 2008, which he had spotted in advance: “I violated the Noah rule; predicting rain doesn’t count, building an ark does.” And now the invasion of Ukraine has shocked us all. If we knew in the abstract that great power conflict might return, we failed to take action and prepare for it. We too violated the Noah rule—and a bonfire of our complacency has left us stunned and horrified.
How on earth did we get to the situation in the third decade of the 21st century, where we are watching on TV a modern European state attack another modern European state, using the medieval technique of besieging citizens with long-range artillery bombardment?
Vladimir Putin, the man from Leningrad, seems to have learned nothing from what happened to his home city from 1941 to 1944: 872 days of siege and no victory for Hitler. But that one man from Leningrad controls this war.