The State of Us by Jon Snow

Author:Jon Snow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473599444
Publisher: Penguin Random House UK
Published: 2022-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

Energy for war, war for energy

That story continues to this day. The current war in Ukraine is not ostensibly being fought over oil, unlike Iraq, but disrupted energy supplies and attendant price rises are a knock-on effect. European dependency on Russian fossil fuels has emboldened Vladimir Putin, leaving him feeling both financially and militarily invulnerable. Had the West seen the writing on the wall for fossil fuels before the war in Iraq, we would be far better prepared for the situation we currently face. Ultimately, British interests will be weakened as we go into a period of great economic uncertainty.

Still, the conflict in Ukraine has deep roots and, just as Iraq shifted the balance of power globally, the war in Ukraine is very likely to do the same. Russo-Western relationships have been fraught for my entire life, but I think we have entered an entirely new era. Before, it was very easy to have an Iron Curtain. It’s only today that we’re paying for it. Nothing was achieved in the Iron Curtain era beyond ensuring that the Russians never came in and we never had to go out, as it were, to deal with them.

Today, there are many striking points of difference. Most obvious is the lack of mass Russian support for bad behaviour. We’re not seeing demonstrations of support in Red Square. Of course there are parades, and there is much chatter through the Kremlin’s propaganda outlets, but these pale in comparison to the groundswell of support we would have expected to see as a matter of course in the past. In previous eras, at the very least, millions of people would have been marched out to fill Red Square with adulation for their great leader. Well, the great leader is not looking so great. He is also coy with the Russian people, refusing to clearly state that the nation is at war, even as the number of Russian soldiers returning in body bags is mounting in the tens of thousands.

Russians are becoming increasingly aware that their nation is not looking like the force it was. Ukraine’s resistance has been remarkable. It has turned history upside down to some extent. It is an extraordinary moment because it’s beginning to make us look at the past and wonder, could we have done things differently? When I went to Russia, even in the Gorbachev era, you realized the place was absolutely decades behind us. People’s way of life was very hard. There were long shopping queues, with citizens wrapped up in layers because the heating was largely non-existent. It was a backward state, one you couldn’t come away from saying, ‘Hey, that’s the future.’ You simply couldn’t – it was the past.

Still, for most of the twentieth century there was a presumed genuine threat that Russia could invade Europe, and that by extension it could end up being the pre-eminent power in the world. That was something people worried about; I worried about it very much. I grew up convinced of it.

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