A writer-publisher’s Ukrainian diary: 1

16 March 2022
Tony Blair has said that to keep telling Putin all the things we won’t do in the face of Putin’s carnage (e.g. enforce a no-fly zone, give Ukraine Polish MiGs, co-occupy and safeguard Western Ukraine with the Ukrainian Army, guarantee Ukraine from nuclear attack), is ‘a strange strategy’. Worse, it is encouraging Putin to continue his insane war. For almost the first time in my life, I find myself agreeing with Blair.

28 March
Joe Biden called Putin ‘a war criminal’, to screams of protest from Moscow, but Biden is literally right. Now he has called Putin ‘a butcher’ who ‘cannot stay in power’, to screams of ‘gaffe!’ from the West. I don’t for one moment believe that by ‘cannot stay in power’ Biden meant ‘the U.S. will remove him’; I think most people believe he was saying ‘such a madman simply has to go’. He was expressing his outrage. As I have said myself, there are certainly Russians who want to remove Putin for morally and economically ruining their country, and I bet they are about it. Personally, I find it a relief to discover that a President of the United States still dares say publicly what millions of us are thinking.

29 March
For reasons that I quite understand, Zelensky has repeatedly called for ‘face-to-face talks with Putin’. But I hope to God he doesn’t mean it literally. The Times reports today that Abramovich and two Ukrainian negotiators ‘developed symptoms consistent with chemical poisoning whilst staying in Kyiv after a day of negotiations’, and although U.S. intelligence thinks the cause was ‘environmental’, the statistical likelihood is that they were poisoned intentionally. I was told by Russian dissidents years ago that Putin was obsessed with poisoning. Remember Litvinenko, remember former Ukrainian president Yushchenko’s bloated face, the attempt to poison Politkovskaya, the poisoning of the Skripals, Navalny’s near-fatal poisoning… Putin and his people think poisoning is a great wheeze, terribly funny. (Recall the CCTV footage of his agents laughing in Salisbury after delivering novichok.) A British woman I know was interpreting at high-level talks with Putin, he took a dislike to her for particular reasons, and she could not appear in public for weeks afterwards as she came out in a dramatic rash. (The theory is that the chair she sat on at the Russian Embassy was impregnated with some virus like Pityriasis rosea.) If I were Volodymyr Zelensky I would never be in the same building as Putin, let alone the same room. And in any case: is it possible to meet the madman who is responsible for killing thousands of your own people and devastating your country? I certainly couldn’t do it. Putin doesn’t do negotiating, only dictating, and if Zelensky personally made a deal with him which was then rejected by the Ukrainian people in a referendum, Zelensky would surely have to resign, which would be a victory for Putin and disaster for Ukraine. Let Zelensky’s negotiators negotiate it, and Zelensky stay in his Kyiv office. He need ratify it only after it has been approved by the referendum.

31 March
Some people may think Zelensky and his team are weakening. First he told the world three weeks ago that ‘we have to accept we are not joining NATO’, and this week he has offered Russia ‘neutrality’ after a peace settlement. These are not symptoms of weakening, they are using reality for Ukraine’s purposes. Even before the Russians invaded, Ukraine was in a position where it ‘was not joining NATO’, because one of the terms for joining NATO is that a country should not be in a border dispute with any of its neighbours. But that is very different from ‘will never join NATO’, as no country can allow itself to be threatened, blackmailed, bullied and raped into declaring it will never do something. That would be for the democracy Ukraine to surrender unconditionally to the autocracy Russia.

Given that there is no immediate prospect of Ukraine qualifying to join NATO, Zelensky is right to offer Russia (and the West) neutrality. But he is demanding military guarantees of that neutrality from Russia and western powers. Here, again, he is absolutely right: it would be rectifying the shameful situation I referred to in the first paragraph of my previous post, when the West gave Ukraine ‘assurances’ of its security after brokering the nuclear demilitarization of Ukraine, but they were worthless, as they contained no deterrents (threats), and did not prevent this war.

However, I am afraid to say that neutrality guaranteed by Russia and western powers (the U.S., obviously, but the U.K., France and Germany have also been mentioned) would create the severest danger of a third world war to have emerged from the whole crisis, because it would create a situation analogous to Europe in 1914. Think: is Putin capable of being as mad as the Kaiser, dismissing the guarantees of western powers as ‘a scrap of paper’, and invading a neutral state? Yes, he is.

2 April
The West is still behaving as though Putin were ten foot tall. At the beginning of this war he made a bloodcurdling threat to use nuclear weapons if we interfered, he put his nuclear arsenal on a higher alert, and now he has sent nuclear submarines into the North Atlantic. Therefore, the general feeling is, we must not do anything that could possibly annoy him. Biden says Putin ‘cannot stay in power’ and the West’s diplomats howl that this is handing Putin ‘the propaganda narrative’. Forgive me, but you have handed Putin the narrative already. The man is not ten foot tall, he is a ranting psychopathic gambler like Hitler and his army a crime against humanity. It is time for us to get a grip like the Ukrainians and understand that we have nothing to fear but our own fear.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.