Hell on Earth

Vladimir Putin’s cataclysmic act of war has upended order in Europe – and perhaps the world – for ever. How has it come to this?

We Russians will have to bear our guilt until the doomed regime collapses. For it surely will collapse – the attack on a free Ukraine is the beginning of the end Putin’s crumbling pyramid of power By Vladimir Sorokin

ON 24 FEBRUARY, THE ARMOUR OF THE “ENLIGHTENED AUTOCRAT” that had housed Vladimir Putin for the previous 20 years cracked and fell to pieces. The world saw a monster – crazed in its desires and ruthless in its decisions. The monster had grown gradually, gaining strength from year to year, marinating in its own absolute authority, imperial aggression, hatred for western democracy, and malice fuelled by the resentment engendered by the fall of the USSR. Now Europe will have to deal, not with the former Putin, but the new Putin who has cast aside his mask of “business partnership” and “peaceful collaboration”. There shall never again be peace with him. How and why has this come to pass?

In the final film of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, when Frodo Baggins has to throw into the seething lava the cursed Ring of Power, the ring which has brought so much suffering and war to the inhabitants of Middle Earth, he decides to keep it for himself. And, by the will of the ring, his face suddenly begins to change, becoming evil and sinister. The ring had taken total possession of him. Even so, in Tolkien’s book, there’s a happy ending …

When Putin was put on the throne of Russian power by an ailing Boris Yeltsin in 1999, his face was rather sympathetic, attractive even – and his rhetoric was entirely sound.