Activists should champion Ukraine’s right to resist and an international order based on shared values and peace. Da The Guardian.
o we ever learn? Vladimir Putin joins a cast of monsters – from Saddam Hussein to Muammar Gaddafi – who were once blessed by western patronage. His regime was forged in the ruins of Grozny, and legitimised in the property portfolios of Highgate and Chelsea. Twenty-three years ago, the then largely unknown Putin surfed a national wave of jingoism to become Boris Yeltsin’s successor, after a series of supposed terrorist bombings in Russian apartment buildings provided a pretext for the country’s second Chechen war. Never mind that there is compelling evidence that Russian security services carried out these bombings to provide a casus belli for the invasion, never mind that tens of thousands of Chechens were slaughtered amid horrendous war crimes: Putin was lauded and embraced.
The former MI6 chief, Sir Richard Dearlove, expressed his regret in 2018 for our security services’ role in Putin’s rise to power, including the time Tony Blair was offered up to the Russians for a photo op in 2000. The following year the former prime minister also drew parallels between Chechnya and the west’s “war on terror”. Putin’s descent into unapologetic authoritarianism didn’t lead Blair to revise his opinions – instead, he urged the west to put aside its displeasure at the annexation of Crimea in 2014 to ally with Putin against “radical Islam”, a plea he repeated in 2018, just three months after the Salisbury poisonings.
