At the beginning of February, the eminent Ukrainian historian Serhii Plokhy gave an interview about Russian official attitudes to Ukraine. It proved prescient. 

Plokhii explained to the New Statesman that Putin’s version of Russian history was one prevalent in 19th Century Imperial Russia, where the Tsars ruled three combined Russias; Russia itself, “little Russia”, i.e. Ukraine, and “White Russia”, today’s Belarus.

This is now Putin’s view. It looks to the Tsars over the shoulder of the imperialism of Josef Stalin. Putinism yearns to restore the legacy of the Yalta Conference of February 1945, when Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin agreed to carve the world into respective “spheres of influence”. 

For Stalin, this meant that any area of Europe liberated by the Red Army should fall under the thrall of the Soviet Union.

This has now become the Putin broken record purporting to be historically informed policy. This, says Plokhy, leads to a belief that smaller countries do not have the right to full sovereignty. 

Too much democracy cannot be allowed to exist in client states, whether it’s Finland after 1940, Armenia since the revolution of 2018, or Ukraine from 1991 on. “Countries being both democratic and pro-Russian in geopolitical terms is a virtual impossibility. A democratic Poland would not have been a member of the Warsaw Pact in the Cold War.”

This means the war in Ukraine is going to be tough for Ukraine, and for Russia — for whom it could be a disaster in its present political configuration. The reason why Putin’s Russia and Moscow clique are approaching an abyss is hinted at in Plokhy’s new book Atoms and Ashes, a look at nuclear disasters, from Bikini Atoll to Fukushima.

Plokhy, now a professor at Harvard, has written previously about his native Ukraine, Russia and the Chernobyl nuclear accident of 1986. The new book is both timely, and out of time. 

Nuclear energy and the legacy of Chernobyl are its central themes. But there is so much more to be said about them in the aftermath of the Russian attack on Ukraine on 24 February. 

The mismanagement and bungling of the official approach to the explosion at the plant, the mishandled evacuations of populations and the terrible retribution of technicians and political blame-shifting have echoes in the blundering Russian operations still underway in Donbas, Mariupol and Odessa.

The book gives brisk and highly readable accounts of six major disasters, opening with the Castle Bravo US nuclear weapons test at Bikini Atoll in March 1954. 

Inhabitants of two island groups in the Marshalls were evacuated almost as an afterthought as radiated debris spread. An unnoticed Japanese fishing vessel, Lucky Dragon No5, was also caught, and the testimony of its contaminated crew on return to port at Yaizu proved damning. 

The explosion on 1 March produced double the calculated yield of radioactive material. The chief scientist at the test, Al Graves, claimed little effect at a hearing in 1957 but died in July 1965 at the age of 55. “The thyroid gland was so atrophied, it was hard to identify,” according to the medical report.

The narrative moves from Bikini Atoll to the explosion at a plant in Kyshtym, a reactor complex in a closed city to provide material for the burgeoning Russian H-bomb programme. Much of the incident is still shrouded in mystery, though the chaos of the rescue, evacuations and cover-up were a harbinger of the Chernobyl blow-up in 1986. 

Many of the early nuclear power plants were dual-use — civil and military — providing power for the domestic electricity grid, and fissile material for nuclear weapons.

This was the case at Sellafield on the Cumbrian coast, where the reactors there and at Calder Hall were providing material for Britain’s attempt to develop its own independent nuclear weapon. 

An “annealing” process of heating and then cooling and restoring the casing was underway at the reactor Pile 1 at the Windscale complex on the morning of 7 October 1957. Unexpectedly fire broke out, and within hours this became a full-scale emergency.

Fire in the reactor was to be repeated in the disasters at the wholly civil plant at Three Mile Island outside Harrisburg in Pennsylvania on 27 March 1979, at Chernobyl in 1986, and the Fukushima disaster on 11 March 2011.

All are tales of bad procedures, poor training and staff organisation, and bad instrumentation at the controls of the plant.

Plokhy is strong on the actions of the political leaders in each incident, and none comes out with entire credit. The most knowledgeable was Jimmy Carter, a naval nuclear engineer who had worked with Admiral Rickover building the first nuclear submarines as a young associate in 1952.

He really understood what was going on, including the myth of the “China Syndrome” — which originated from a film of the same name — predicting a nuclear plant melting through the Earth’s core.

The author is weakest on the Sellafield disaster, bearing the risk of food contamination across North West England and into the Irish Sea. He is shaky on geography, insisting Cumbria is in the North East of the UK, which he claims had become the heart of nuclear Britain. 

Nothing is mentioned of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire, still going strong today as the AWE, or the associated Royal Ordnance sites at Burghfield and Cardiff. 

Aldermaston was the target of the Easter marches of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Committee of 100, which so troubled Harold Macmillan in selling his nuclear plans to the public. 

Of CND there is no mention, and the initiatives of Bertrand Russell, Oppenheimer and Salk in their Pugwash Conferences for disarmament and world peace get a scant reference, too.

Macmillan gave up on an independent British nuclear weapon when he signed the Anglo-American Treaty for nuclear cooperation in 1958. The author misses a trick here, too. 

The 1958 treaty is the model for the new AUKUS treaty involving nuclear submarine cooperation between the US, UK and now Australia to confront nuclear China. This important development at least bears mention by footnote.

These omissions in Atoms and Ashes reflect the difficulty books of this nature have in navigating between history, contemporary history, current affairs and raw journalism. It bears out Alan Bennett’s brilliant quip in The History Boys, “there is no period so remote as the recent past.”

The last two incidents recounted, the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, and the destruction of the Fukushima plant on Honshu in March 2011, point up issues that are vividly alive in the Ukraine war.

The explosions and fires at the Chernobyl complex on 24 April 1986 caused the biggest damage and loss to human life of all six incidents in the book. Rescue crews and helicopter pilots deliberately risked their lives. 

The zone is still polluted. Even Russian formations advancing from Belarus from 24 February this year, used the grounds of the old plants as tank parks, kicking up clouds of dust and debris still thought to be contaminated. The effect on the young soldiers was not, and will not be, recorded.

The pollution from the initial blasts spread across the borders of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. Today, Ukraine still derives half its electricity from nuclear power — with five main complexes and a total of 15 reactors. 

One of the biggest nuclear centres is at Zaporizhzhia on the Dniepr and whose oblast includes Mariupol. A few weeks ago we had videos of tanks firing on the reactor centres. To what end and what risk one may only guess. There are huge questions about the nuclear future of the entire region.

The Fukushima incident of March 2011 raises another critical issue in the geopolitical fallout of the Ukraine war, whose true depth and scale we are only beginning to grasp. 

At 2.46 pm local time on 11 March 2011 one of the biggest earthquakes in a thousand years took place under the sea 40 miles off the coast of the large Japanese island of Honshu, and 110 miles from the complex of six reactors at Fukushima. 

It took some hours before the plant was hit by a tsunami in the three phases. A fire broke out and panic ensued, not helped by the innate commercial caution and technical incompetence of the TEPCO and the insistence by prime minister Naoto Kan, a quintessential control freak, that he take command.

Evacuations took place slowly and 520 contaminated wastewater found its way to the ocean. A further 1.25 million tons of wastewater remains sealed up in tanks. 

Altogether 10,000 suffered radiation in some form, and 150,000 became refugees, though this is only half the number at Chernobyl. The total cleanup bill has been calculated at $35 billion.

Fukushima caused panic in China, which had planned to build 52 new reactors. In Germany, the Bundestag voted to close all nuclear power facilities by 2022, and Chancellor Merkel declared there would be no new ones. 

Germany thus became even more dependent on Russian hydrocarbon fuel — not forgetting that Angela Merkel’s predecessor Gerhard Schröder became vice president of the premier Russian state energy contractor, Gazprom.   

Events since 24 February render much of the author’s concluding thoughts obsolete. The UN nuclear panel, the IAEA, calculates that the world needs to increase its generation of nuclear power to provide electricity from the current ten per cent to at least 25 per cent by 2050 if we had to get half a grip on the challenges of climate change. 

Plokhy suggests that the risk is too dangerous. The development of nuclear power generation is a story of human error, bad practice and training, and weak monitoring down to poor and inadequate instrumentation for regulation. 

He quotes, with approval, one scientist’s prediction; “one core meltdown accident very 37,000 reactor years.” Nuclear energy should now enter its autumn years with as much safety preparation as possible.

Is it all over for nuclear power? 

The question is raised but not answered by Atoms and Ashes, a quirky and brilliant read of a book. There is a lot more to be said about filling the energy gap and the fossil fuel challenge. 

There is either a much shorter or longer book screaming to get out of this one, with its dense recitations of facts and figures. 

But before that, we need Serhii Plokhy to give us more of his powerful insights into the tangled saga of Russia and his beloved Ukraine.

In 1979, President Jimmy Carter launched an initiative for the US government to invest heavily in renewable energy resources. This is the starting point for Fire and Flood, described by the author Eugene Linden as “a People’s History of Climate Change, from 1979 to the Present”. Linden, a journalist now 75, has been pursuing this theme since a breakthrough article in Time Magazine in 1988. The book is a vigorous polemic — some of the argument is dense and not for the faint-hearted. It is not for the hardcore climate change sceptics. 

I don’t think it will change hearts and minds in that constituency. It does, however, form a handy guide to the milestones in the debate and discoveries into climate change and related environmental matters over the past 40 years. It gives good summaries of the science and the political debates and rows. But it is especially strong on climate journalism and how, at times, this has been poorly served in metropolitan and international mainstream media.

The opening fusillade of facts and statistics is loud and clear. The biggest burners of fossil fuels are India and China — the latter has quadrupled the emissions of Greenhouse Gasses — GHGs — since 1990, and between 1990 and 2010 China’s GHG emission topped that of all the other OECD countries put together.

Climate science per se has had slow acceptance, Linden argues, and mainstream media has been slow to pick it up. I recall returning from Antarctica in 1984 — from a work passage with HMS Endurance — to report to the BBC newsroom that British scientists out of Halley Station had found a somewhat worrisome hole in the Ozone layer, and this could be a big story. The editor, not known as a scientific visionary, grunted “sounds a bit overblown, leave it.”

I wrote up my trip to the southern oceans in a short book. It was damned with faint praise by my friend and two-times editor, Sir Max Hastings. He concluded his review with the immortal line, “Who cares about Antarctica, anyway ?”

Eugene Linden cares about Antarctica a lot, and one of his most compelling arguments in Fire and Flood is that we all need to think about Antarctica. The discovery of the hole in the Ozone layer by the team under Joe Farman was written up after three seasons and confirmed by NASA in 1988. It would take eleven years for the main culprit, CFCs, Chlorofluorocarbons, used in refrigerator manufacture, to be banned.

In 1995, the mighty Larsen A ice shelf off the Antarctic Peninsula broke up. The UN International Panel on Climate Change, then in its infancy, was shocked and had suggested earlier that the Antarctic ice shelves would be stable till towards the end of the 21st Century. 

In 2002, the Larsen B ice shelf broke up with little warning. Similarly, the oceans off Greenland were feeling the drastic cooling effects from the rapid melt of the Jakobshavn Glacier.

The great changes in Antarctica and the Arctic have been driving cycles of extreme, or “weird”, weather. Huge fires have become more frequent and destructive in Canada, California and Australia. Hurricanes queue up off the coasts of America. 

The permafrost of the tundra across Russia is beginning to melt, releasing methane in huge quantities and generating marathon fires. Linden is at his strongest describing the extremes of weather causing fire, tidal waves and huge cascades of rainfall.

In the Arctic and Antarctica, the drilling of shafts of ice core up to a mile and more deep reveal a fundamental but often overlooked truth about the climate debate, says Linden. They can show temperature fluctuation and changing conditions over the ages for many, many centuries. The revelation is that these are not gradual, smooth or linear. 

The early reports of the IPCC are classics of underwritten bureaucratic prose — as if deliberately designed not to frighten the horses and spark the coals of the climate debate in member nations — and suggest the melting of sea ice, for example, would be a slow and sedate process.

The ice cores suggest differently. Change can be dramatic, jerky and swift — the Little Ice Age, which began around 1300 CE, began, and then ended abruptly in a matter of a few years. The same can be expected now. 

This makes the arguments in international forums about setting zero-emission, and sustainable temperature increase targets especially tricky. The zero-emission dates discussed at the Paris and Glasgow COP conferences of around 2050 to 2060 seem quite arbitrary. 

It is unlikely that either India or China can wean themselves from fossil fuel power by either date — and at least India said so plainly at Glasgow.

According to Linden, a rise of average global temperatures of two degrees Celsius above pre-Industrial Age levels spells real trouble, and a possible three or even four-degree excess by 2100 means catastrophe for many parts of the world.

Not only does it carry a threat of coastal inundation but with it will come vicious spikes in temperature. Already parts of India, briefly last summer in Canada and frequently in Africa, areas have become impossible for human life — humans simply cannot breathe there. 

Dust storms in the Iraqi desert that used to blow for 30 days a year, now prevail for 300 days, according to the International Red Cross.

Though fascinated by glaciology and what it tells us, the author gives almost no attention to the glaciers, some 2,400 of them, of the mighty Asian mountain chains of the Himalayas, Hindu Kush and Karakorum, where a lot appears to be happening. The off- run into great rivers from the Indus and Ganges to the Mekong and Yangtse nourishes around three billion people. 

Some are melting by force, causing flood, drought and famine — and this seems to have been an important catalyst to the upheaval and chaos in Afghanistan these past three years. Some Asian glaciers are feared to be facing extinction within the next fifty years.

There is much focus on the politics of the climate debate — mostly from a Washington metropolitan perspective, and perhaps too much so. We have Republicans saying climate “is just a Democrat issue”, and Rush Limbaugh declaring that climate change is “the greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American people.” 

They are joined by a Saudi diplomat who told a conference, “there is no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change.” Malcolm Turnbull, the former Australian PM, puts the matter differently and more accurately when he wondered why “an issue of physics becomes an issue of identity and values.”

Fire and Flood pays surprisingly little attention to movements like Extinction Rebellion and even the activities of mainstream Green parties concerning climate change. Greta Thunberg is dismissed in a short paragraph. Both the Paris Climate Conference of 2015 and the Paris Accords get equally short shrift. They are mentioned in passing but with little analysis save noting their rejection by the Trump administration.

The book is an unfortunate victim of its publishing deadline. This has allowed for no mention of Glasgow COP26 and Cairo COP27. A second, updated and revised edition is urgently needed. This should allow the author to cover some conspicuous omissions. Though he rants about Trump and his supporters — often over matters unconnected to climate and the environment — he does not examine the religious or faith component in the polemics of many climate change rejectionists.

There is very little appreciation of the role of environment and climatic considerations in contemporary security, strategy and resilience postures and policy. Climate is central to future provisions for food and energy security and homeland resilience against storm, flood, fire and heat.

The story isn’t all gloom. The evolution of climate policies and strategy has been disrupted by the onset of Covid, and the upheaval in energy markets from the Ukraine war. But Covid brought innovation, ingenuity and cooperation in care, prevention, vaccine and medicines. 

There have been enormous gains in developing renewable sources of energy — an $11 billion industry in the US. America now gets a fifth of its electricity from renewables and Germany about 40 per cent. The insurance and reinsurance business is now beginning seriously to grasp the implications of the worst impacts of climatic shifts.

 Managing what’s in store requires goodwill, cooperation and a bit of that rare commodity, altruism. In a rather weak conclusion, the author seems to believe a world of democratic socialism, à la Bernie Sanders is the answer — though I am not sure if he means democratic socialism or social democracy.

This points out that Fire and Flood, like so much of climate debate itself, is a work in progress. Eugene Linden gives helpful guides and pointers but few answers. So, it’s up to all of us to engage with this awkward creature — our survival as a species could just depend on it.

For the author and publisher of Helen Thompson’s magnificent new book, this must be the best and worst of times. Disorder is a brilliant extended essay on the troubles of the era in terms of energy, global finance, governance and democracy.

It was published on 22 February, the day Putin gave his final marching order for his legions to advance on Ukraine. So much of this tortuously fascinating book gives the background to the global crisis now upon us, specifically in energy and governance. 

This will now be spun, distorted and amplified by the Ukraine war, now the focal point of what is sure to be a protracted and global trauma — no continent, maybe not even Antarctica and the cone of South America will escape its effect. A new edition and extra chapters are sure to follow; they are not only desirable but a necessity.

Helen Thompson is a professor of political economy at Cambridge. She is known for her pithy discourse in seminars and webinars, and the Talking Politics podcast she shares with her Cambridge team colleague David Runciman.

Her thesis is that we are heading for a major crunch, largely triggered by the demand for energy, most notably for the moment in gas. This plays to the crisis in finance, global and national, which in turn plays to the story of societal fragility, in which bad politics is both symptom and catalyst. “Covid has exposed weaknesses in our society which are difficult to mend,” she tells me in a conversation a week before publication, “and we cannot get back to where we were before.”

The theme is in the subtitle; “Disorder – Hard Times in the 21st Century.” The first, and in a way the most fascinating part of the story, is in energy. 

We begin in the latter third of the 19th century when oil was being discovered in Persia at roughly the same time that Chancellor Bismarck was banging on about the Balkans not being worth the bones of a Pomeranian Grenadier in the wake of the Congress of Berlin of 1878. Both are signs of empire, and imperial destinies, old and new.

Thompson argues that energy exploration and exploitation have dictated global rivalries and alliances to a greater extent than most give credit. It is why Britain sits outside the main European bloc — to this day — because of its peculiar relations with Persia, Arabia and the Gulf, amongst other things. 

The author demonstrates in a number of intriguing aspects why the UK is such a poor fit with the various schemes western Europe has pushed for its unity and security, especially the European Economic Community and then the European Union.

Oil and railroads provided the fortunes on which the Union of the USA was cemented and prospered after the civil war and the opening of the West. Energy today, the fragilities of supply, demand, marketing and transportation bedevil international dealings and relations, and it is due to get worse, with or without Ukraine. The two biggest powers have a near-paranoid doctrine. 

Under Jimmy Carter, the US went for American energy independence — a chimera then in the 1970s and today. China, with its voracious appetite now for gas in all forms is fixated on the so-called “Malacca Straits Dilemma”, the dependence on so much energy and other essential material coming up through the Indonesia straits — busiest shipping chokepoint in the world. It drives much of Beijing’s fears for vulnerability in the South and East China Seas, the realistic aspect of the desire to take Taiwan.

If Russia stops piping and shipping gas to Europe, China will pick up the supplies. The demand for domestic gas is voracious — it is a new customer clientele equivalent to the total domestic consumption of France every two years.

But Russia will not be able to live by oil and gas alone — and I suspect there are those in the Kremlin that know this. Moscow now is in hoc to Beijing. In 1986, Russia was the largest exporter of oil and gas on the world market. Prices plummeted. 

Mikail Gorbachev knew the game was up, and immediately ordered the withdrawal of Russian forces from their disastrous near-occupation venture in Afghanistan — which even so took three years to complete. The dissolution of the Soviet regime ensued.

The surging demand and contorted politics of the supply of natural gas now dominate our politics — whether we know it or not. “The most vulnerable in Europe is Italy, and this is getting surprisingly little attention,” Helen Thompson tells me in a phone call following the Ukraine invasion. Germany has been caught out badly with the involvement in Gazprom and the promotion of Nord Stream 2 —now confined to history more or less. 

Germany lacks port facilities to handle Liquid Nitrogen Gas (LNG), mainly from the US. “They will have to rely on the Dutch to handle this — and the Dutch have now become critical,” she says. The Dutch are also pushing for more fracking. Pressure will build in the US for expanding fracking, especially if the Iran nuclear deal, JCPOA, goes sour — it is currently on a knife-edge in talks in Vienna.

Italy is vulnerable because of its reliance on Russian gas through pipelines across Ukraine. Italy, too, is deeply involved in Russian banking. The long energy entanglements go back to the buccaneering efforts by Enrico Mattei to build the ENI enterprise. If the Russian gas is turned off, Italy can only make up half the shortfall by imports from Azerbaijan, Algeria and the new Eastern Mediterranean seabed fields. 

The whole Covid recovery programme masterminded by the emergency prime minister Mario Draghi is now at risk — with a possible fiscal black hole of at least €225 billion — this on top of a debt of more than 150 per cent of GDP. “Italy is the country to watch, but we should also watch Turkey, which is badly exposed in the Ukraine crisis, not to mention Iran and India,” Thompson adds.

The Biden administration had been hoping to strike an agreement with Tehran, lift sanctions and buy Iranian oil. If this doesn’t happen, Biden is in the hands of the fracking lobby.

This all has an effect on the attempts at maintaining global fiscal stability — the main aim of the Bretton Woods Conference at the end of the Second World War which entrenched the dollar as the lead reserve currency.

That stability is pretty shot by now, the Thompson thesis suggests. This, in turn, affects governance, politics and the future of liberal democracy in the current climate.

The prospects do not look good. The discussion of global economic outlooks and stability — the superbly informed insight of a true political economist — and the future of democracy and polity take up the last sections of the book, and they are both meaty and original. 

Most intriguing is Thompson’s discussion of the evolution of the European Economic Community and European Union. They were always a poor fit for Britain, whose constitutional, social and even imperial evolution always made it an outlier. 

Europhile prime ministers, principally Edward Heath, John Major and Tony Blair, struggled to make it fit. But in no way could the governance at the higher echelons of the organisation be called democratic or voluntarist. 

From the European Central Bank to the Council of Ministers, there is much more of a whiff of the Chancellery of Otto Von Bismarck or the Conseil d’Etat of Napoleon Bonaparte than the constitutional sallies and thrusts of King Pym, Edmund Burke or Charles James Fox and their legacies.

Intriguingly, the author maps how once in the EEC in 1973, successive UK prime ministers weaselled their way around avoiding a referendum — which they were pretty unsure to win, from Callaghan through Major and Blair, until Cameron was afforded little option. Only Harold Wilson actually did the deed with a referendum in 1975 but pulled it off with characteristic sleight of hand and finesse.

The book is a wonderful primer and agenda-setter for the place we are now in. It is full of squibs and challenges on the very essence of the national and global crisis today. For instance, she shares my scepticism about political parties: “they exist more in form and function now; and in Italy, they tend just to eat up their parties” – with a strong espresso macchiato on the side, I hope.

Rather less attention is given to the roles and dysfunction of organisations like NATO and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe. I would hope that more pages are given to them in the second edition as they are at the heart of the Ukraine imbroglio. The fighting in Ukraine and the prospect of even more in Europe beyond is in no small part down to their failure, and that of the EU.

The issue is best summarised in a signed editorial for the New York Times by Ivan Krastev headlined; “We are all living in Vladimir Putin’s world now.” We have just enjoyed, if that’s the right word, thirty years of phoney peace in Europe, following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Post-1989 and the Cold War, OSCE, NATO and EU were to ensure peace, but now we are once again faced with war in Europe, this time not along the middle kingdom of the sons of Charlemagne in Lotharingia and the Rhineland, but the marches of eastern Europe, once contested by the Teutonic Knights and the hearth troops of Alexander Nevsky. 

The alliances have failed to give peace and reassurance and neglected to encourage and support Russia out of its terrible troubles at the end of the 20th century. Treaties were signed and honoured in an on-off mode in the letter but not in spirit — take the Budapest accords and memorandum of 1994 when Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons with a guarantee of neutrality. 

This was compounded by the folly of the NATO summit at Bucharest in April, 2008 when Georgia and Ukraine were allowed to apply to join the NATO club. France and Germany immediately, and rightly, objected to what they saw as a needless provocation. Three months later Russia attacked Georgia across Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

“Russia could never have accepted a fully independent country sitting right on its border between Russia and Germany,” Thompson observes gloomily when we meet just before the war starts. Under the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, the founding document of the OSCE, in which the US, UK and Russia are among 56 members, international borders should not be altered by forces and aggression, and countries and minorities should have their sovereignty and rights for self-determination upheld. Yet how can these be upheld or enforced, OSCE? There seems less answer than ever now.

Ivan Krastev says that we are now in the cycle of Putin’s belligerent posturings. In making Russia great again, he is not so much a revisionist as a revanchist — a fighter bent on revenge and the recovery of a territory lost by betrayal, real or imaginary.

We are now faced with a formidable alliance of China and Russia as junior partners forged by the latest events. Europe is mired in theological disputes about governance and ideology. It is now very much cut off — and if we believe our democratic values are worth defending we had better get real about how we do this. 

To paraphrase Francis Fukuyama, three decades ago, history isn’t ending, but about to begin a new and deadly phase.

But the periwigs and flounces, tricorn hats and sinister pantomime masks have been out in force — a walking live show, part Don Giovanni, part Harry Potter.

“It has been tough through much of the winter,” says Giovanni whose silks and ties shop, Fiori, has done business since it was set up by his aunt in 1934. “Some of the shops have shut for the duration of Covid, and a lot of my neighbours won’t be opening again.

“The problem is that for months we have had nothing but Covid on the television news. It has really put people off – but the sun has helped bring out the crowds.”

Venetians show remarkable forbearance for the Covid rules — every passenger in the Vaporetto water buses wears a mask. Covid green passes are checked at almost every stop, on the Vaporetto, in bars and shops.

Plague is no stranger to the great city — as dozens of shrines, great and small, testify. On the Giudecca island rises the basilica of Il Santissimo Redentore — the Redeemer — the glorious masterpiece of Andrea Palladio; built in 1592, it was to thank God for deliverance from the plague of 1575 to 76, which killed some 46,000 people, over a quarter of the entire population.

Sneaking along the Giudecca I came across a quiet celebration of Vespers in the Redentore — half a dozen priests in full vestments, with a congregation only three times their number.

Strolling along the Giudecca makes visiting Venice at this season, with its hint of spring, such a particular and private joy. It is a vibrant little neighbourhood, with local bars spilling onto the pavements — frequented by people who really do work and live here. The half dozen trattoria offers some of the best eating in the city. They nestle close to yards building and repairing boats of all shapes and sizes for trading between the islands — and gondolas ancient and modern, each a capo lavoro of the shipwright’s craft.

Now is the season to visit Venice, as the old city, La Serenissima, is at its radiant best in the spring sunshine. I have been visiting for over 55 years, studied its past, reported on its present and future — not nearly as gloomy as some Jeremiahs would have it. It is always full of surprises and strange pleasures.

Carnival brings its own fashion season. This year the shows in the boutique windows are both practical and ironic. Most show different styles of boots, stivali di gomma (wellingtons) come up high and arch in the ankle, just like the buskins that were the mark of the courtesans of Renaissance Venice. 

One of the flashiest shows is at the Prada boutique, with a brilliant mixture of highly coloured kilts and skirts on androgynous mannequins, part Michelangelo’s David, part Venus de Milo or Madonna. This year’s devil wearing Prada in Venice is strictly gender fluid.

The boots are a reminder of the devastation of the flood in November 2019, the worst since 1966, which wrecked much of the centre, and brought five-foot waves to St Mark’s. “It really set us back – a real blow, coming just before Covid struck,” says Federico, 28, head barista at Illy’s Caffè by the Royal Gardens. “But we are getting things together – and of course, we’ll have some good parties in Carnevale – even if it’s behind locked doors.”

The Royal Gardens, between the Grand Canal and St Marks, are a splendid piece of Venetian revival. For years they were abandoned but now they are restored as a quiet place for all to walk and reflect, with a great deal of British help in their resurrection.

Directly across the lagoon from the gardens lies the Island of San Giorgio, the object of my travel to Venice this time around. I had come to a meeting of British and Italian journalists known as the Venice Seminar. It has been held for 26 years in a row, with only one cancellation last year for Covid. 

We discuss the view of the world from an Italian perspective — the Italian government, especially the present coalition of Mario Draghi, speaking with a candour that makes the institutional secretiveness of Whitehall almost shameful.

This year the setting made the event particularly special. San Giorgio is the site of the second great Venetian church of Andrea Palladio, and behind it lies a beautifully restored convent complex. 

This is now run by the Fondazione Cini, complete with study halls, a library, archives, a modern sculpture park, a box hedge maze (dedicated to Jorge Luis Borges, naturally) and a concert hall in a converted boathouse.

The selling point, and big surprise, is a vast painting in the original refectory. The Wedding at Cana (1562) by Paolo Veronese was nabbed by Napoleon’s troops after they took Venice in 1797. 

It is still displayed in the Louvre. But a group of art experts and philanthropists have cloned the painting, an amazing feat of engineering, for the setting originally intended by Veronese and his friend and collaborator Palladio.

“This is not a copy — it’s a clone, with the same textures, tones and colours,” says Marco Alvarà, a proud Venetian, scientist and entrepreneur. 

“There has been quite a controversy with the Louvre (ie row) about which is the more valuable. They are the same painting — but here we have it with exactly the situation and lighting scheme that the painter and Andrea Palladio intended.”

The Russian President has given himself surprisingly little room for manoeuvre. He may have sixty per cent of Russia’s ground combat force poised to attack Ukraine, and half the combat air power. There are no reserves to back them, of anything like equal capability. He cannot afford a long war, even less a difficult occupation. He has the lessons of Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria as a warning. It will be difficult to hold down a country the size of Germany and France combined.

This is why a sharp, heavy armoured thrust to Kyiv, some two hours’ drive from the Belarus border, looks a first priority. Up to eight lines of attack have been identified by Nato planners, most concentrated on Kyiv, the Donbas enclave, Karkyv, with its large Russian-speaking population, and the coasts of the Black Sea and Sea of Azov. Intriguingly, the planners suggest an operation to link up with pro-Russian forces and militias in Transnistria, sandwiched between Ukraine’s south-west border and Moldova.

The actions of recent hours and days seem to point to now rather than never. The barrage of accusations about ceasefire violations in the Donbas enclave of Eastern Ukraine have continued for a third day. Russia says Ukrainian artillery has been shelling the Russian entities in Luhansk and Donetsk. The Kremlin has threatened “military-technical adjustments” in retaliation – in other words, war.

More than half the 114 Battalion Tactical Groups ringing Ukraine have now moved out of their staging posts and towards the border. At dawn today about half, some 50,000 troops, were reckoned by Nato to be within 35 miles of the main crossing points into Ukraine.

Overnight reinforcements have been moving towards the Belarus frontier with Ukraine, crossing the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, the sanitised area following the nuclear station collapse in 1986.

The Kremlin has also announced that Russia’s forces will start their annual Grom strategic drills from Saturday, “under our supreme commander in chief, Vladimir V Putin.” These will include exercises with strategic missiles and nuclear forces, ships of the Black Sea and ground and air forces of Russia’s southern command.

The war games could be cover to launch the all-out invasion of Ukraine, which many Nato leaders believe could be imminent, “though not inevitable”, as UK security minister Damian Hinds told Times Radio today.

The force of around 150,000 presently assembled won’t be enough to hold Ukraine, particularly if guerrilla resistance and an insurgency campaign like Afghanistan’s Mujahedeen and Taliban, or the militants in Iraq, ensues. It could soon be a major civil war that could blow back into Russia itself.

For Putin, there might be too many plates to keep spinning once the action starts. There are suggestions that the Kremlin can withstand any sanctions Biden and the Europeans will throw at them. But could they ride out a stock market collapse in Moscow, and exclusion from much of the international banking system?

Russia could threaten to turn off the gas supply to Europe – the EU gets 41 per cent of all its gas from Russia – which puts Germany and Italy, especially, in a bind. But the gas tourniquet is double-edged for Moscow. It cuts off revenue, and throws Russia even more into the arms of China, and on unfavourable terms, given the hard bargains Beijing has recently driven.

There are further developments likely to disquiet the increasingly tight cabal round Putin. First there is the prospect of the renegotiation of the Iran nuclear deal, the JCPOA of 2015, failing altogether, as the Vienna talks face collapse. This means Iran under President Raisi will go for broke on nuclear arming. Nuclear Iran on its southern border, backing Azerbaijan, supporting the militias in Syria, and the Houthis in Yemen, becomes a very present challenge to Russia.

Syria on its own is a heavy financial as well as military commitment. So too are missions, official and unofficial, through mercenary groups like Wagner in North and sub-Saharan Africa.

The image of Putin as a man in a hurry is reinforced by reports of domestic unease across the vast Russian territory over Covid, whose full impact is not fully appreciated by the outside world. Opinion polls, which have proved pretty reliable, indicate most Russians – much of the citizenry of St. Petersburg and Moscow, for instance – do not favour further military operations in Ukraine.

Putin knows he has to succeed in short order in Ukraine, whatever his grand scheme may be in fact or fantasy. In 2024 he is due to put up for re-election as president, which by the latest rearrangement of the deckchairs of the Russian constitution might put him in power until 2036.

Seasoned Kremlin watchers sense that he is becoming increasingly isolated. “The circle of cronies is getting smaller,” says a senior British diplomat. “He is obsessed with Ukraine and believes it never should have been let go.

“He practices gangster politics,” i.e. no rules but his own. “Salisbury and the Skripals, the treatment of Navalny, are typical – and allowing an ally like Syria to use chemical weapons – which his predecessors Gorbachev and Yeltsin would never have done.”

Putin is beginning to look like the desperate gangster in a desperate hurry, which makes him desperately dangerous.

Despite the announcement that Russian tanks were “pulling back after completing their drills”, no one in the Nato alliance was buying the line that the massive build-up forces around Ukraine had all been a game of bluff. “It still has to be verified that they are moving back,” briefed America’s Ambassador to Nato, Julianne Smith. “It’s too early to assess what they are doing.”

Boris Johnson gave a sobering and succinct verdict after consulting British intelligence chiefs at a Cobra security meeting. While agreeing there were “signs of a diplomatic opening,” he added that latest intelligence from the ground was “not encouraging.” Some 60 per cent of Russian ground combat power was now in place to attack Ukraine. Despite the Moscow announcement of tank units returning to barracks, fresh units were arriving – including military hospital units close to the border.

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace gave a clear update before the Nato defence ministers’ meeting in Brussels today, confirming there were still no signs of a concerted withdrawal of Russia’s forward units. There are signs of further intense activity by naval units in the Black Sea, he warned. 

Russian forces facing Ukraine now number nearly 100 Battalion Tactical Groups, with tanks, mechanised infantry, and an array of drones, ground rockets, missiles and heavy artillery. Formations in Belarus are configured for a lightning advance on Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, which could be executed in two hours.

“We don’t think Putin has made a final decision yet,” said a senior UK strategic planner. “We shouldn’t get too hung up on dates,” he added, countering suggestions that Russian commanders had set the H-Hour to launch the attacks at 01.00 local time on 16 February, which has now passed. “It could happen at any time,” said the strategic planner, implying that the attacks could be launched even while the Kremlin was talking about further rounds of diplomacy.

There is still some head scratching in the capitals and headquarters of the Nato allies about what Vladimir Putin wants in the short and long term. “We do not know what is going on in President Putin’s head,” said Ambassador Smith after several meetings with Russian officials in the Nato-Russia council.

After meeting Chancellor Scholz, the Kremlin spokesman said that President Putin had asked for “the Nato issue to be resolved,” once and for all.

One of the UK’s most experienced envoys who has engaged with Putin’s diplomacy since he first came to power, said he is a master of switching psychological tactics and goals. His overall aim is the disruption and reduction of the influence of Nato. He believes that his predecessors Mikail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin “gave away too much,” with 1997 and Poland’s accession to the Nato alliance as the turning point. Ten years later Putin gave his keynote speech to the Munich Security Conference in which he attacked the role of Nato in Europe and the dominance of the US in global relations as a whole.

“He is also obsessed with Ukraine, and getting Ukraine back,” explained the envoy. “He thinks it should never have been let go by Russia.”

This has led to the deployment of more than half of the Russian army’s combat power and half the strength and capability of the Russian air force. “The force is superior to Ukraine’s forces,” said James Hackett, editor of the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ annual catalogue of armed forces, The Military Balance, at the launch of the edition for 2022.

Under Putin, Russia’s forces have undergone a huge modernisation programme in training, strategy, and equipment. There are now fewer conscript soldiers and more than half the force surrounding Ukraine now are professional soldiers hired on contract. But the upgrade of weaponry isn’t yet complete, and funds are likely to be tight if Ukraine becomes a long campaign – for instance many of the tanks are refurbished T-72s and not the more modern T-14s launched in 2015.

British strategic analysts and diplomats do not believe that Russian forces could sustain a long campaign, particularly if it involved a difficult occupation of a country the size of France and Germany combined. “Putin has to listen to veterans of the Afghan campaign [1979 – 1989],” which led to bloody and inconclusive occupation, according to one British diplomat.  

“He will not want to get bogged down. He is more likely to invade and then pull back; he is clever enough to make it up as he goes along.” Another senior government analyst suggested, “he will want to go in fast. A standoff is unlikely. He wants to get rid of the Zelensky government in Kyiv quickly.”

On Tuesday the Duma, the lower house of parliament in Moscow, introduced a motion to recognise the independence of the “Democratic Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk”, the enclaves of Russian speakers in the Donbas in South East Ukraine. At the same time, the Kremlin said it was alarmed at the “reports of serious human rights abuses of the inhabitants of the enclave, i.e. Russians, by the Ukrainian authorities. This has been taken as a possible “false flag” propaganda ploy by Moscow to justify its military action.

If so, it is uncharacteristically clumsy. Most of the forces in the enclaves are Russian military, militias and volunteers and they are the de facto authorities there.

Moscow’s military planners have to avoid a long and difficult campaign, and an occupation bedeviled by the constant threat of insurgency and resistance from the Ukrainians – a grinding, low level, civil war. The generals and the Kremlin may have assembled potent forces of up to 130,000. But if they get bogged down, or fall apart, there is nothing to replace them. It’s the only army Putin has got.

So now Vladimir Putin is in a psychodrama of his own making. He will have to choose his tactics carefully, or face strategic defeat. “He always sets a hierarchy of aims and he can switch between them,” according to a senior British ambassador.

“So far there are no signs of de-escalation of Russia’s forces. And Putin is very, very good at putting on psychological pressure.”

A college of “Grand Electors” will meet at the Palazzo Montecitorio, the Lower House of parliament. These number all eligible parliamentarians, Senators and Deputies, plus 80 or so special nominees from Italy’s regions. The voting is by secret ballot, with names of candidates written on the voting papers. A majority of 673, two thirds, can win on the first three ballots. Then it takes a simple majority of 505 to be elected. At each round the weaker candidates drop out.

It is a ritual full of ceremony, and fun, for a job of great prestige but very little hands-on power. So why the fuss this time?

First the fun. Candidates shouldn’t declare themselves – but this time one of the great performers of Italian public life had made no bones about wanting the job. Silvio Berlusconi, 85, is a three-time former prime minister (convicted of fraud), billionaire entrepreneur, and former cruise ship crooner. In office he was notorious for his “Bunga Bunga” parties with young female artistes. In recent weeks he has been reported phoning up fellow electors and announcing himself as “Signor Bunga Bunga” before attempting to canvas a vote.

Were he to be selected at 85, he would be 92 at the end of the seven-year term of the presidency. He has said that he would like the present prime minister, Mario Draghi, former chair of the ECB and a leading economist, to stay on – despite being unelected. Berlusconi, however, hasn’t entirely ruled out demanding a vote of no confidence in the government, a cross party coalition of politicians and technicians. Parties allied to his revived Forza Italia on the Right, namely Matteo Salvini’s Lega, and the Brothers of Italy of Giorgia Meloni, have been dropping broad hints about the need for fresh elections.

These would come just as the dramatic reform and recovery programme crafted by Mario Draghi is getting up a full head of steam. It involves the expenditure of some €235 billion, the lion’s share of some €190 billion coming from the EU’s Covid recovery fund. Draghi has won plaudits for what he has achieved so far. After years of stagnation the Italian economy has grown robustly. He has set about reforming Italy’s creaking justice system – for years the notion of the law’s delay has been a pathetic understatement. He is also trying to raise standards and opportunities for women in the workplace.

His success led the Economist magazine to nominate Italy as the country of the year in its Christmas edition – mostly for the growth in the economy and the sense of optimism installed by Draghi’s enigmatic and charismatic personality.

If he became President, he would be there for seven years in the role of a grand “Fourth Official”, ensuring competence and fair play in the field of justice as well as government. Italian presidents have grown steadily more powerful and influential in recent years under the last three outstanding incumbents: Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, like Draghi a former central bank governor and who unusually was elected in the first round, Giorgio Napolitano, the great former Euro communist who unusually did one and a half terms, and the present incumbent, the quiet and dignified Sergio Mattarella – on whom an awful lot now hangs.

If Draghi is chosen, he could just appoint a new prime minister in his own image to see the recovery programme through to the late spring of next year, at the end of the present parliament’s five-year term. Draghi always intended his economic recovery to run for two years initially.

Present allies in the coalition are already setting out to upset this arrangement, to get a new government in and trigger a new election. The nationalist Lega chief and former Interior Minister Matteo Salvini is leading the charge. He believes he has the backing of Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, now riding high in the polls, and most of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia crew. They think they would win enough seats in a general election to form a new rightwing nationalist coalition. Salvini wants to be prime minister, and senses this might be his last chance.

This possibility has already started spooking the markets, and many fear that Salvini and Meloni are jeopardising the entire recovery project.

There are two unknowns now in play. First, it is not evident that Mario Draghi wants the job – though to turn down such an honour, to make Dante’s “gran rifiuto” or great refusal as Celestine V did of the papacy, would be an insult to the office of President and Italian State. The second unknown is whether Sergio Mattarella would be prepared to be elected for an interim second term of 18 months to two years. This is what Giorgio Napolitano did ten years ago in the interest of saving Italy in its hour of crisis. It would allow Draghi to be chosen as president once the initial phase of his recovery offensive is complete.

So far Mattarella has said he doesn’t want to hang on, and it is time to go. But he is a deeply honourable man – in the estimate of my friend the writer Marella Caracciolo-Chia “he is the best president Italy has had so far.” Could he be persuaded that this is not the time to rock the boat, and that his cool and calm hand is needed on the tiller for just another round? He has used his powers of heading the judiciary, summoning and dismissing prime ministers, governments and parliaments with elegance, adroitness and humanity. After all, it was Sergio Mattarella that persuaded Mario Draghi to become prime minister and take command of the Covid emergency and the economic recovery operation.

Not that Mario Draghi lacks critics. In a catty OpEd in the Washington Post, Mattia Ferraresi of the newspaper Domani, took issue with his record. “Don’t fall for the hype. Italy is ‘no country of the year,” screams the headline on her piece. She wrote that Italy didn’t deserve the praise from the Economist. Italy at last is enjoying growth, she concedes, but only after a 9 per cent contraction in GDP in 2020. Moreover, public debt is still 154.4 per cent of GDP.

Productivity levels are still low. Italians are still leaving in numbers to get work abroad. Fertility rates are low – a key indicator of confidence. Moreover, youth unemployment – the 20 and young 30-year-olds – is around 30 per cent. This contrasts with the economic performance of France through the Covid pandemic, which has been remarkably buoyant, as Paul Krugman has just pointed out in the New York Times. He is right in suggesting that it is likely to be a major factor in the re-election of Emmanuel Macron. This is despite France enjoying shorter statutory working week and lower pension age than many European rivals. Youth employment is picking up in France today.

Ferraresi concedes grudgingly that Draghi has injected a spirit of major reform and optimism. This worries her, as he the unelected prime minister has succeeded where elected premiers and coalitions have failed.

What the editor of Domani avoids recognising is that Draghi is a world class cajoler and fixer, and that would be his great value either in continuing as prime minister or as president.

Meanwhile for fans of all kinds of Italian theatre and opera it is not a case of Tonio’s sobbing aria “è finite la commedia’ (the drama is over) in Cavalleria Rusticana, but ‘è iniziata la commemdia’ – the comedy is just beginning.

In the initial round all kinds of candidates get written in on the ballot papers – for years Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida were great favourites. Recently the leftist 5 Star Movement, desperately trying to re-invent itself now that it likes being in parliament and government, has said ideally it is time for a woman president. Almost overnight posters have appeared in Rome and posts on Instagram with the visage of the veteran former crooner Silvio Berlusconi, 85, photoshopped as a woman.

The attention being given to the choice, however, suggests the new importance of the office, and of Italy, in the affairs of Europe and the world today. And that is in no small measure down to the comportment and ability of Mario Draghi and Sergio Mattarella.

The great trick of Roberto Calasso, the legendary Italian publisher and author who died last summer at the age of 80, is to reorientate and recount great stories of the past in a completely beguiling and novel manner. The Book of All Books is the lastest to be translated into English by the talented Tim Parks, and it is perhaps his most ambitious literary escapade of them all. 

Taking its title from Goethe, it is the repackaging of the Old Testament from the founding story of Genesis through the Patriarchs and the Prophets and the attendance of the Messiah. A topic in which Calasso is at his most provocative, and elusive.

“He takes you back to stories that you thought you knew well – and I come from a background steeped in the Charismatic movement – but here they appear in a fresh and original light,” says Parks.

The story of the people of Israel being chosen, cursed, punished, exiled, yet repeatedly redeemed as God’s chosen ones is not in any way presented as a polemic. There is nothing of Milton or Dante about this, of “justifying God’s way to man”, or the trials of ascent to the Celestial Rose at the conclusion of the Divine Comedy. “Calasso is very playful,” says Parks, “saying to the reader these are the facts as I have chosen them. Make up your own mind.”

“It makes translation quite difficult – to keep it light – and especially when it comes to the quotations from the Latin text. I had to work hard to make sure that it didn’t come across as a plodding schoolboy translation.” This is quite an admission from Parks, one of the most accomplished translators of Italian into English today. 

He has translated Moravia, Calvino and Machiavelli. In his translation and essays on the Prince (Il Principe), he provided one of the most original accounts of that much-maligned, misunderstood piece of advice to Renaissance rulers, or anyone else for that matter, facing regime failure.

There is a wonderfully episodic feel to this version of the Old Testament story. There are pages of rambling, colourful anecdotes, and pithy observation. 

In a profound sense, it is a reflection of how Frankie Howerd described Hollywood Old Testament epics by the likes of Cecil B. DeMille as “Carry On Bible”. Colour is dragged in from other contemporary sources and legends. The details are related with a straight face, or perhaps we should say a straight pen – Calasso always wrote in longhand allegedly.

Abraham dies at the age of 132, and Noah, in his drunkenness, is covered by Canaan, the son of Ham, and is reviled for it. Calasso does not hint whether he thinks these are history or pieces of creative writing.

All is told as fact, leaving it to the reader to judge. In the words of the late, great Frankie Howerd, Calasso appears to be saying to his audience, “Oh, please yourselves, dears.”

There is a coherent architecture to the book, however much Calasso tries to hide it. The story is the choosing of Israel, from the Creation to the Patriarchs, broken by the missteps of the Tower of Babel and the Flood. This period is the period of Grace. With Moses, the time of the Prophets begins leading to the anticipation of the Messiah, the ninth Prophet in the line of succession from Moses himself. This is the period of the Law – based on the Covenant made between Yahweh (Jehovah), the one invisible God of the Jews, and his chosen people.  

The story from Genesis to Moses is one of individuals and Grace, and the story from Moses is one of community and the Law. With the Exodus of the children of Israel out of Egypt, we are at another breakpoint: “With the prophets we enter the world of facts,” writes Calasso. 

The progress of Israel, through the building of the Temple by Solomon, the destruction of the Temple in 586 BCE, the exile in Babylon, right through the to the crucifixion of Christ and the destruction of the Second Temple by Titus 70 CE, are matters of record. The progress of the Jewish from Moses on is history, fashioned and pioneered in a unique manner.

The whole story, as fermented and decanted by Calasso, is full of revenge, gore, betrayal – and sex. “There is an awful lot of sex and the erotic,” says Parks. Calasso suggests that it is by sleeping around the Israelites reached out to the other peoples around them, from the Moabites to the Egyptians – the excesses the King James Bible calls their “fornications” and “whoredoms”. 

Calasso shows women and the erotic in a quite original light. The understated roles of Sarah, Rachel, Rahab and Ruth are vital in pushing the narrative of Israel forward.

Calasso is also fixated on sacrifice, the sheer scale and brutality of what he calls the “holocausts” – from the Greek word – and the “anathema” as he labels the hundreds of thousands of sheep, oxen, and humans slain and made burned offerings. Mutilation was part of the binding to Yahweh from the first circumcision by Abraham on himself “with a hatchet”. Later, St John Chrysostom commented on the contract implied: “circumcision imposes on you the entire yoke of the Law.”

Following the Romans’ destruction of the second Temple, circumcision and sacrifice of animals, a common practice in the Temple, went into abeyance. Circumcision was revived as a notion by the great Maimonides of Cordoba. In his Guide for the Perplexed, he wrote, “As regards circumcision, I think that one of its objects is to limit sexual intercourse, and to weaken the organ of generation as far as possible, and thus cause man to be moderate.” 

Calasso quotes this with relish, adding that Maimonides also counselled that the way to mitigate erotic arousal and sexual over-excitement was to turn to study in the synagogue. Maimonides, the greatest of 12th-century sages, is an important figure in the conclusion of Calasso’s book. He fervently anticipated the arrival of the Messiah and the subsequent Resurrection of the Dead: 

“When the Messiah comes, he will very likely pass unobserved, because he will only change some small things. And no one knows which.” This is Calasso at his most cryptic.

He is at his most provocative fun in a crisp chapter about Freud and his whole take on the story of the Jewish people. It comes from nowhere towards the end of the book and is based on Freud’s last book about the history of the Jews, and the earlier books about dreams and neurosis, and totems and taboos. 

Freud wrestles with the uniqueness of the story of the Jews and the children of Israel, to which he feels both attached and yet distant. In his quirky analysis of the Jewish depiction of the founding father – Yahweh – both Freud and Calasso are at their most puckish and provocative – and sneakily profound.

The collaboration between author and translation was exacting and exciting, says Parks. “His English was good enough to understand exactly what I was doing. He was extraordinary – he kept himself out of the media limelight. He didn’t want to write columns for the big papers like Corriere and Repubblica. He didn’t get involved with contemporary scholars – the scholars he refers to are from seventy or more years ago.”

“He was very careful about reviews – and kept two copies of every reference to him in reviews and articles in his archive,” he says.

He matched writing with running one of Italy’s leading literary publishing houses, Adelphi. “It was a great achievement and success. He brought attention to central European writers that might have been missed – such as Joseph Roth, (The Radetzky March and The Emperor’s Tomb). Goodness knows what happens to Adelphi now; he will be much missed.”

Parks himself is engaged in more translations and his novels, essays and reflections on Italy’s past in its present. Last year he published The Heroes’ Way, in which he followed the route taken by Giuseppe Garibaldi and his followers on their retreat from Rome to Ravenna, after a failed republican insurrection in Rome in 1849.

Garibaldi features in the new project. Last year, in a lull in Covid, Parks and his partner Eleonora took the route of Garibaldi and the Thousand from their landing at Marsala in their successful march on Palermo in 1860. 

“It was hot, we had to wear masks in the open air, and we had to be tested (for Covid) all the time. The presence of control and the state was everywhere. Think back to those men who landed, and the Sicilians who joined them – they were half starving, didn’t know what would happen, and most expected to die. A complete contrast to our own (hyper) controlled times.”

The story of his march to Palermo should be with us soon. No doubt it will have the quirky touches for which Parks is renowned and excels in his own way, as Calasso does in his. With The Book of All Books, we have an eccentric masterpiece. “It is episodic and fragmented,” says its translator, “and you can enjoy it like that pick it up and read it in parts.”

It is one of the most brilliantly provocative and witty accounts of history and letters I have read for years – and wondrously managed and moderated by its translator Tim Parks.

One of the few positive signs from the meeting was that both sides agreed to go on talking. Russia, led by deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov, said it did not intend to invade Ukraine – though it has continued to manoeuvre its four army groups in its west ever closer to the Ukraine border. Latest reports reveal that new helicopter units have joined the forces, suggesting an attack of some kind might be only days away.

The terms raised by Ryabkov suggested a hardening of Vladimir Putin’s stance on Ukraine and Nato in general. Ukraine must never aspire, let alone apply, to join Nato. Newly joined members of Nato, mostly former Soviet Union satellites, should reduce the number of exercises and deployment of missile forces on their territory. There should be no expansion of Nato membership in eastern Europe.

“For us it is absolutely mandatory to make sure that Ukraine never, never becomes a member of Nato,” Ryabkov said after the meeting. “We need iron-clad, waterproof, bulletproof, legally binding guarantees… It is a matter of Russia’s national security.”

Nato military chiefs now believe a Russian military operation is more likely than not, and the opening moves could start this weekend. The Biden administration appears to have learned from the response of the Obama administration to the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, and from the chaotic retreat from Kabul last year. US diplomats and military are consulting with interested parties at every level.

The US services chief General Mark Milley has been consulting regularly with his new British counterpart Admiral Tony Radakin. Both have spoken with their Russian opposite, General of the Army Valery Gerasimov. Radakin privately described the encounter as “very interesting”, and Gerasimov appeared to have discounted a full-on attack on Ukraine, but this was a week or so back and events are moving quickly.

America and Europe are discussing a two-strand strategy: widespread punitive sanctions and preparations for a Ukrainian campaign of guerrilla counter-insurgency, should Russian forces invade and occupy.

The sanctions might involve depriving Russia from access to international banking and credit facilities, including denial of the SWIFT clearing protocol – as happened with mixed results in sanctioning Iran.

The counter-occupation campaign involves the preparation of stay-behind forces with caches of weapons such as Stinger man-portable air defence missiles, and Javelin anti-tank rockets. Russian forces have fared poorly in operations of pacification and occupation since 1979, which saw the disastrous ten-year assistance and occupation to aid a creaking communist regime in Afghanistan.

Russia now has eight operational army formations formed up Klintsy in the north at the angle with the border between Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, with a reserve in the training ground at Yelnya. To the south and east five groups are arranged in an arc from Soloti, Pogonovo and Boguchar to two groups facing the separatist enclave of Luhansk and Donetsk, at Persianovskiy and Rostov on Don and a reserve in Volgograd – once known as Stalingrad. Another group has been stood up in Crimea itself.

This latter cluster of forces circling southern Ukraine may be a hint of what Putin’s next move may be. His diplomats have said that Russia does not intend an invasion of Ukraine as such, but several now speak of the need for “military-technical adjustments.” This could mean a move to shut off the Sea of Azov, denying Ukrainian and allied naval forces access, and an attempt to establish a “land bridge” across the north shore of the Azov Sea linking Russia to Crimea through the port of Mariupol.

This could well involve the UK because of the new agreements for Britain to assist building new patrol craft and in training for the Ukraine navy. Russia has made it plain it wants to deny whole tracts of the Black Sea to Nato allies. It has recently denied access to the Azov Sea on the pretext of holding live-fire naval exercises there.

In the string of meetings, the session of the Nato-Russia Council on Wednesday and the OSCE, the 56 member Organisation of Security and Cooperation in Europe, due at the end of the week, will provide clear milestones. Both will bring Ukrainian representatives into the wider negotiating arena.

Russia will depict Nato and the US as the rule breakers and bringers of threat and instability. The Russian delegation will demand a dial-down and pull back of Nato from patrolling and arming countries on its borders. It will also demand that no more new members are allowed to join the alliance. This could be a slender straw that breaks the camel’s back. Russia does not want Ukraine and Georgia to join the alliance. This week, against all previous run of play, the government of Finland has opened discussion about joining Nato as a full member. If Finland joins, so will Sweden. Putin faces the prospect of two new Nato partners in and around Russia’s northern borders.

Much is now focused on the increasingly erratic rhetoric and state of mind of Vladimir Putin himself which is causing swirls of suspicion and fear in Moscow, and the whole defence and security apparatus of the Kremlin. He is behaving like a haunted man in a hurry. He has accused Ukraine and the West of breach of trust and breaking established agreements. Yet it was he that broke in letter and spirit two of the more successful late and post-Cold War security treaties, the INF, governing intermediate nuclear weapons, and the CFE, governing Conventional Forces Europe. In tearing these up he had latterly the aid of Donald Trump playing the role of useful idiot.

With an attack on Ukraine he will breach another fundamental agreement of European security, the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, to which Russia was full signatory. It holds that no international border should be altered by the use of force. Russia has tried this before with limited success in Crimea in 2014 and South Ossetia bordering Georgia in 2008.

Putin seems bent on reconstituting the old Soviet empire, along lines of his own fantastical imagining. He regards the collapse of the old Soviet Union as “the biggest geo-political disaster of the 20^th century.” He has established the Common Security Treaty Organisation, with six former Soviet Union partners, nations headed by kleptocratic thugs like Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus and the Nazarbeyev-Tokayev clique of Kazakhstan. Putin believes that Ukraine is an integral part of his old-new empire, and seems unwilling to register that most Ukrainians, whether by political or cultural inclination, do not feel part of Russia.

Putin’s post-Soviet version of Stalin’s old empire might pay lip service to the Marxist analysis of its founding myth. More useful for all of us as Ukraine teeters towards war might be a Freudian analysis of the motives and psyche of Vladimir Putin himself.

No stranger to a touch of theatre, the former prime minister, billionaire, Bunga-Bunga artiste, once earned a crust as a crooner on cruise liners. At 85, his complexion has the sheen of all-weather teak garden furniture. Were he to be elected in this year’s presidential elections, he would be 92 when the term expires in 2029. The first round of voting is on January 24. He thinks he is well up to the task – and achieving the presidency would be the pinnacle to a colourful career which has brought as many collisions with the courts as the Italian electorate.

After all, Italy is the cradle of opera buffa, not to forget la commedia dell’ arte and Pulcinella, forebear of Mr Punch. After all, Mr Berlusconi popularised campaigning by cable television and the internet decades before Donald Trump. He still has a strong following among some Italians. But few among the college of 1009 ‘grand electors’ – 630 parliamentary deputies, 321 senators and 58 representatives from Italy’s regions – tasked with job of choosing the next president, take his candidature seriously.

Not that the election to this largely ceremonial and highly prestigious post is being taken lightly. This time round it is particularly weighty, and the outcome could have serious implications for Italy’s economic recovery from years of economic slump, dysfunctional governance and Covid. The job has become steadily more important since the Italian Republican was born in 1948.The president may have few real powers, but he – and it always has been a ‘he’ to date – has growing influence. The president can choose a new prime minister, approve the cabinet and its programme, dissolve parliament and order new elections. The president heads the governing body of the judiciary and the key budget oversight committee.

The last three presidents, including Sergio Mattarella the present incumbent, have wielded their powers with subtlety and skill, sometimes decisively so. They have saved the country from constitutional shipwreck, and previous steered Italians through the major terrorist campaign of the Red Brigades, a series of homegrown and international financial crises, as well as the perennial problems of mass illegal immigration. Predecessors include Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, a former Bank of Italy Governor, and the veteran conscience of the centre-left, Giorgio Napolitano – who managed to curb the excesses of Silvio Berlusconi in his last run as prime minister. 
The current president, the softly spoken but effective Sicilian Sergio Mattarella, made the decisive move of asking one of Italy’s leading bankers and economic brains, Mario Draghi, to head an emergency government last February. Draghi was to manage the expenditure of a recovery fund of some €220 billion from the EU and the Italian Treasury to reverse spiralling economic collapse and mount a social and fiscal recovery from the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Now, Draghi is at the heart of Italy’s conundrum about the presidency. He is not even sure that he wants the job, previously saying he wanted to see his recovery programme through until Spring 2023, prior to the parliamentary elections that have to be held by 1^st June that year. Were he to want the job, he is likely to be chosen in the first two or three ballots of the electoral college, despite these requiring two thirds of the votes – at least 673 ballots out of the 1,009. 

Draghi’s election would mean handing over the prime minister’s chair to a trusted colleague to see through his reform package. This would require a parliamentary vote of confidence – always a bit of a performance in Italy’s parliamentary theatre, and a risky one. 

This is where the importance of the election suddenly becomes much deeper and wider – with an impact on Europe and beyond. Mario Draghi’s reforms have managed to restore a sense of stability to Italian politics and public administration, and offered a point of reference of clear strategic thinking to the EU and its allies. Not that the programme has gone entirely smoothly. But Draghi’s term of as prime minister has brought new growth at last to the Italian economy. Much needed law reforms – especially to mitigate trial delays and back logs – are now on the way. Draghi’s determination to redress the glaring imbalance of women in the professions is reported to be bearing fruit. Youth unemployment, however, remains stubbornly high.

He has been involved in new bilateral treaty arrangements between Italy and the new German coalition, and with President Macron of France. He has had early meetings with Chancellor Olaf Scholtz to discuss EMU progress and EU banking convergence, if not unification. The two know each other well from previous incarnations as Governor of the European Central Bank and Germany’s Finance Minister, and know how to do business.

The picture seems rather different with Macron. The Quirinal Treaty between Rome and Paris has not turned out as strong as had first been advertised. In part this seems to be down to a classic piece of Emmanuel Macron grand-standing. He wanted France to be acknowledged by the EU leader in defence and foreign policy, and thus appeared to be talking past the Italians.

The Italians have recently been much more successful than France in naval sales and exports. Their shipbuilding industries are supposed to be joined in a 50-50 venture called Naviris. But so far the Italians have outsold the French with their design of the FREMM frigate – originally an Italo-French design – with Italian sales to Indonesia, Qatar and the new class of frigate for the US Navy. Fincantieri of Italy is now the fourth largest naval builder in the world, and recently won a contract from Mexico to build the largest  naval shipyard in Latin America. 

A recent private meeting I had with a senior French diplomat confirmed the current French insouciance towards Italy’s role in Europe and strategy and stability throughout the region, and towards Mario Draghi in particular. Though having served in Italy, the senior envoy seemed little bothered about Draghi and the Italian presidential election – dismissing Italian politics as a continuous mess. What really counted, it seemed, was how the Elysée handled the incoming German coalition government, the Ukraine crisis (though this didn’t cause too much concern), and France taking the lead for better EU relations with China. 

By seeing Italy, and with it Spain, Greece and Portugal,  as second tier in EU affairs, the envoy seems to be pointing to a looming crisis. Italian diplomats are privately critical in castigating aspects of Macron foreign policy across the Mediterranean.  In isolating Turkey, grandstanding in Lebanon, and taking the side of the Benghazi warlord Khalifa Haftar in Libya, France has effectively worked against EU and UN initiatives for peace and stability, they say. 

Draghi is likely to be at the heart of EU strategy for the next year at least. It’s even been suggested that the election to the presidency could be delayed for a year, with Mattarella staying on for an extra year or 18 months in a brief second term, to be sure that Draghi takes up the post. However, this is unlikely; Sergio Mattarella doesn’t want to hang on. Another answer is to elect a respected figure to the presidency who would allow Draghi to carry out the reform programme until April or May 2023.

A likely choice might be Paolo Gentiloni, a former prime minister and foreign minister, now serving as Economics Commissioner in Brussels. The problem is that in vacating the post to return to Rome, Gentiloni would have surrendered Italy’s hold over the hugely influential economics portfolio. 

Whatever happens, Draghi faces the most significant year of his career, for himself, Italy, Europe and maybe even the global community.

Russia is considering a “military-technical response” to what it considers provocative and threatening postures by Nato, the Russian leader said yesterday. Hitherto he has said that Russia was trying to avoid direct action and war.

Ukrainian leaders and western intelligence now expect some kind of provocative incident around Ukraine, Belarus or the Baltic republics – now Nato members – in the next few days or weeks. “It could even be some sort of incident by provocateurs inside Ukraine,” according to Hanna Shelest, head of Ukraine Analytica in Kyiv.

In the past week, Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister, has spelled out a list of demands from Nato and Ukraine. They include a withdrawal of any offensive weaponry from Nato allies neighbouring Russia, specifically Poland and Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Nato teams and equipment must be withdrawn from Ukraine. Moscow wants a new treaty arrangement, supervised by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) pledging that Ukraine and Georgia will never join Nato or the EU.

Hanna Shelest, speaking in a Webinar from Kyiv says Putin and Russia are comporting themselves like the abusive partner in a domestic dispute. “The abuser continually tests the tolerance of the abused, promises not to abuse and then does it again as long as he knowns he can get away with it. The West – Nato and the US – are behaving like the weak social worker or counsellor who tries to persuade the victim to moderate their behaviour – and to be less provocative towards the aggressor.”

Ryabkov and his boss, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, know they are making demands of Nato which cannot be met. “Russia is trying to reverse the outcome of the Cold War,” Yevhen Hlibovytsky, a well-known Ukrainian commentator, told Tuesday’s webinar from Kyiv.

“For Putin it’s now much more than Ukraine. Putin has advanced a long way against Nato. It’s now about his legacy. He knows that if he loses now, he loses his entire legacy. It’s a dangerous moment because the whole framework of power in Moscow now depends on him. If Putin goes, it all falls apart. It’s a very dangerous moment – and this is not generally appreciated in the West.”

Though he believes Nato is weak and divided, Putin is not expected to launch a direct attack along a broad front into Ukraine, despite having marshalled roughly 100,000 armoured troops and reserves in forward positions.

“He knows open attack isn’t beneficial to Russia,” says Hanna Shelest. “He will work through proxies – particularly in disinformation. The whole exercise in Crimea (the annexation in 2014) wasn’t logical or rational. He learned to use provocateurs inside the country, and that’s what I think he is doing now inside Ukraine.”

 “I think his message to the West is “back off,’” says Volodymyr Dubovyk a professor at Odessa University, who hosted the web discussion. “He is now threatening continuous instability.”

“He can be quite irrational,” adds Yevhen Hlibovytsky. “He has shown himself as a brilliant tactician, but he is no strategist.” He is appealing to nostalgia for a glorious past under the USSR – to the extent that the Russian international hockey team has recently paraded in Soviet uniforms. This summer Putin repeated his view that the “collapse of the Soviet Union was the biggest geopolitical disaster of the Twentieth Century.”  

He has deliberately embarked on the latest round of brinkmanship to coincide with the 30^th anniversary of Ukraine’s independence, our web seminar concluded.  “There is a great deal of symbolism, and there are cultural reasons why Putin has to be centred on Ukraine,” says Yevhen. “For him it is key to Russian identity” – with Kyiv as the founding capital.

This is being encouraged by increasingly strident nationalist pronouncements by the Head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kyrylov. All three Ukrainian analysts agreed in yesterday’s webinar that Putin seems to be facing an unusual amount of domestic pressure. This is not so much from the protests from the underground media and the supporters of  opposition leaders like the jailed Alexander Navalnay – mostly generated from abroad now. The new element is the push from hardliners within the Kremlin itself, especially the military faction led by the Defence Minister General of the Army Sergey Shoygu – who want to push Putin to more direct action against Ukraine.

The most probable area of action is likely to be a push to take the region round the port of Mariupol in order to link Russia itself with Crimea, the so-called “Crimea corridor.” Already Moscow has tried to close off the adjoining Sea of Azov on the pretext of holding naval exercises. “They are using international law, such as the laws of the sea, to gain advantage,” Hanna Shelest told me. “It’s the employment of ‘lawfare’ – which they are also using in the Arctic.”

One of the biggest constraints for Putin is time. He can only keep the armoured and motor rifle units, the 100,000 now forming up in four huge concentration areas, for a few weeks at most. This gives the lie to the idea that they can wait for the spring or to the end of January at the earliest. He is also beginning to feel his age as he approaches 70 and he may be worrying about his health giving out.

Another problem is the growing sophistication of Ukrainian forces. They have recently acquired Turkish Bayraktar Tb2 strike drones. These proved highly effective, and decisive even, in conflicts in Libya and Nagorno Karabakh last year. The Bayraktars are now being made under Turkish licence in Ukraine itself – where manufacturing and development facilities are more advanced than in Turkey itself.

In Nagorno Karabakh last year, the new missiles proved battle winners in combination with new Israeli munitions, command and targeting equipment  then appearing on the battlefield for the first time. The so-called ‘suicide drones’ and Israel Harap (Harp 2) loitering strike drone proved devastating against the older Russian military weaponry used by the Armenian forces. The use of Israeli weapons and systems with the Turkish drones in Ukraine now could be devastating against Russian battle tanks and heavy artillery batteries. “I suspect there would be a lot of electronic warfare, jamming and hacking of the different command systems,” says Hanna Shelest.

Putin senses that he has got the Biden administration on the back foot, an impression reinforced by Secretary of State Antony Blinken suggesting that talks about the European security system should be opened in a month’s time. This is likely to encourage further rounds of abusive behaviour from Moscow, our three Ukrainian commentators agreed.

In the past two days, gas supplies to Germany have been slowed down. According to Putin this is merely owing to ‘commercial factors.’

Putin and his ministers may be bidding high in their latest challenge to the US, Nato and the EU leadership, but they know their demands cannot be met. They are a little more than a complete redrawing of the European security order since 1989, and the terms laid out at the crucial Nato summit in Bucharest in 2008. Sergei Lavrov demanded a signed treaty that Nato weapons wouldn’t be deployed forward in former USSR countries now in Nato and that Ukraine and Georgia will never join the alliance. “The document of demands is too vague, and they know it can’t be discussed seriously,” Hanna suggests. “They are not a basis for negotiation.

“It’s a cheap ultimatum. It’s typical of a domestic violence situation, in order to make the victim feel guilty.”

Satellite photos copiously supplied to the Washington Post by US intelligence agencies show Russian ground forces massing in four main areas – Forward Concentration Areas – FCAs – in Nato jargon. These are in the Yelnya military exercise area opposite the Belarus border, the Boyevo district which has received two main influxes of manoeuvre formations, and the Persianovka district opposite the Donbas enclaves of Ukraine and now stuffed with artillery and tanks. Finally new battle groups have been exercising in Crimea – just a short march away from the Dnieper river barrier, which splits Ukraine in half.

Latest reports from the CIA and other agencies estimate that the three main concentration areas, Yelnya, Boyevo and Persianovka have been so crowded that units have already been sent forward to positions closer to the actual Ukraine border. These may be new launch positions from which an invasion attack can be launched. Latest imagery has shown some of the frontline units being supplemented by casualty clearing station teams and equipment, and field hospitals.

The Russian has form for Christmas attacks. On Christmas Eve 1979 Leonid Brezhnev ordered the 40^th field army of the Soviet forces into Afghanistan to shore up the collapsing communist regime in Kabul. The force numbered around 100,000 in all. The Russians stayed in Afghanistan for just under ten years, at the cost of 14,500 dead and 53,750 wounded. Up to two million Afghans are thought to have died from the effects of the conflict. The Afghan episode was a catalyst to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The dead and wounded from Afghanistan are still powerful memories, especially as the air in Moscow and Kyiv is filled with rumours about a future Russian invasion operation – this time in Europe.

This week Nato and the EU have told Putin to pull his forces back and stop threatening Ukraine. In turn Putin and his foreign minister Sergei Lavrov have said it is Russia that is being threatened, and Nato has broken its word in sending troops and equipment to back the regime in Kyiv.

The meeting of the EU council of ministers in Brussels on Thursday warned Russia of “massive consequences,” and “severe cost,” if Russia uses force. This was taken to be code for even more sanctions, and the suspension of the new Nord Stream 2 pipeline bringing gas under the Baltic directly from Russia into Germany.

The North Atlantic Council of Nato demanded that Russia withdraw its force now in offensive positions on the Ukraine border. President Biden said that the US would help President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev in what ways it could. But he ruled out sending American forces to fight in Ukraine.

In his statement on Wednesday, Lavrov laid out his country’s beef with the Western alliance over Ukraine and what Moscow sees as generally threatening behaviour towards Russia’s frontier lands, not least in the Baltic states as well as Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia. Russia wants the deal known as “Minsk 2” agreed in February to be honoured. The pact, brokered by France and Germany with Russia, has 13 points, starting with a general ceasefire to be overseen by the Organisation for Cooperation and Security Europe – the OSCE. The two pockets with Russian speaking populations, Luhansk and Donetsk in the Donbas, are to be given local autonomy, to be included in the Ukraine constitution, and suitably to be monitored by the parties to the Minsk accord, Russia especially.

This has been taken by Moscow to mean that it has a right to intervene, and very likely interfere, with the affairs of Kiev on behalf of their fellow-Russian speakers, kinsmen and friends in the Donbas. Furthermore, the Lavrov statement demanded that Ukraine desist in trying to join Nato or the EU at any time. All Nato advisory forces and their equipment should be withdrawn from “threatening” Russia from Ukraine. Nato should cancel any notion that Ukraine and Georgia could join their club.

This harks back to what is known as the Bucharest decision of 2008. At the Nato summit in the Romanian capital in April 2008 the alliance decided that Ukraine and Georgia might become members of the alliance at an unspecified future date. Germany and the UK opposed the move, fearing it might be seen as unduly provocative for Moscow. In August that year Russian troops attacked into Georgia, after a pre-emptive move by the regime in Tbilisi over the region of South Ossetia. It must be said that despite the huge advantage in military muscle, things did not go all that well for the Russians. Their troops had been receiving rough treatment for some years in Chechnya. Vladimir Putin ordered a review of Russia’s defence forces immediately on account of the near-debacle in Georgia.

Nato’s open, albeit vague, invitation may be the background. So too is Putin’s romantic belief that Russia, Belorus and Ukraine are of one “historic people,” Kyiv being the centre of the great medieval empire of Kievan Rus. He laid his views forth in a rambling essay of 12 July this year. It may appeal to a fanciful exegesis on Russia’s medieval past, but it is a classic piece of 19^th century irredentism – the need to redeem or recover a nation or people’s birthright. Think the Serbs and the battle of Kosovo Polje, the proto-Fascist D’Annuzio marching on Fiume in Istria in 1924 – and the mystical streak in many late Romantic nationalist movements.

Even so, to demand a sovereign nation such as Ukraine renounce any set of choices in its foreign and economic policies and international affairs under a veiled – or not-so-veiled – threat of military force and invasion is a clear act of diplomatic aggression. It impugns Kyiv’s sovereignty. It is, however, a huge gamble by Putin, based on his bet that Biden won’t fight, and risk American soldiers, to defend Ukraine and its independence.    

It is a huge gamble because only 18% of Russians believe in Russian rights over Ukraine according to polls from Moscow, and only 14% of Ukrainians, including Russian speakers in Donbas, believe in a Russian claim over Ukraine, according to polls in Kyiv.

It is a huge gamble, too, because of the kinds of forces Putin now has arrayed around his country’s western borders. By the end of  November there were some 50 Battalion Tactical Groups – BTG – of something over 75,000 according to the Washington Post photos. These are anticipated to double to 100 BTGS and up to 175,000 troops with deep-fire rocket batteries. A force of 100,000 reserves is on standby.

What for? The forces seem to have a huge arsenal of  heavy equipment, tanks, tracked howitzers and rocket batteries, including the infamous Buk lorry-mounted missile batteries like the one that downed the Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17, killing all 298 aboard in the summer of  2014. The Russian ground formations need a lot of maintenance – particularly in the winter. They are relatively old-fashioned, with a lot of indiscriminate firepower. Impressive as they appear in the satellite images, they would barely be enough to attack up to the Dnieper river system, which bisects Ukraine. They are certainly not big or agile enough to sustain a long-term occupation of the great plains towards Kyiv.

The images of the destruction of civilian homes and lives from the indiscriminate firepower of the big guns, bombs and rockets, would make Russia a pariah in world opinion. Very likely this in turn would invite serious charges of war crimes at The Hague.

But Putin may have miscalculated the Ukrainian population itself. War has been running continuously across the Donbas region since 2014, with over 10,000 killed and 24,000 injured. Somewhat embarrassingly, a district court in Rostov-on-Don, at the eastern tip of the Azov sea in southern Russia, has just handed down a judgment which included the statement that Russian forces are now actually operating inside Ukraine in the Luhansk and Donetsk pockets. Putin vehemently denies this.

Roughly 500,000 Ukrainians have served as frontline troops or reservist volunteers during the eight years of fighting in Donbas. They are now experienced and trained in battle. Ukrainian forces are better equipped than in 2014, when the fighting began after the annexation of Crimea. Though outgunned by the Russian battalions, they have state of the art anti-air and anti-tank missiles supplied by the US and Nato allies. They have been mentored by a number of Nato training teams, including some from the UK. Recently they have been equipped with drones from Turkey, such as the Bayraktar Tb2. These proved highly effective against the Russian Wagner Group mercenaries in Libya last year. They were also a key part of the victory of Azerbaijan’s forces against the Armenian military in Nagorno Karabakh last winter. There they were coordinated with cutting-edge guidance and communication systems, suicide drones and loitering munitions from Israel. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that Ukraine could now have its hands on the same lethal mix of Israeli and Turkish remote controlled, pilotless and autonomous munitions.

The size and shape of Putin’s legions present a conundrum. They cannot be kept in a state of readiness for too long – especially with the snow, slush and mud of winter coming on. The troops need to be fed and kept fit. Supply and maintenance chains for fuel, food, spares, ammunition and medicine will be a growing burden once the troops and tanks start to advance.

Covid is rampant in Russia now and causing Putin a major headache, according to underground media from Moscow. The vaccination programme has faltered, and medical services in clinics and hospitals are challenged and stretched – especially in the eastern parts of the Russian federation.

In addition there is the risk of Covid-19 in its new mutations spreading through the 100 or so battalion Task Groups now in purportedly offensive posture in the Ukraine borderlands.

Putin’s big Christmas surprise for Ukraine, could turn out to be a very big, and bad, surprise for him.

British defence chiefs believe that Russia has already begun the campaign with a familiar pattern of deliberate misdirection and deception. “We are beginning to see the ‘Little Green Men’ appearing,” one senior chief told me just a few days ago. He was referring to the use of militia and special forces in unmarked fatigues inserted to take over Crimea in 2014. They carried no insignia of their units, nor their rank. 

They are a critical element in the pattern of “non-obvious” or “ambiguous” warfare developed by the Russian defence  chief , General of the Army and Defence Minister Valery Gerasimov – which is based on a game of “now you see me, now you don’t,” and concealing the type, scale and line of attack until the last moment. In a way, it is an extension of the Soviet Army deception doctrine of “Maskirovka.”  

“The green men are popping up in several different places – not just opposite the Donbas provinces in Ukraine,” the defence chief told me. “It is very worrying. They are assembling a huge force – the biggest since the Red Army in 1945.”

This week President Joe Biden warned Vladimir Putin against attacking into Ukraine. “The sanctions will be severe,” he said later, “on a scale not seen before.”  Washington believes the Nordstreem 2 gas pipeline from Russia directly into Germany through the Baltic should not go ahead if Putin doesn’t back down. It seems the new German coalition under Olav Scholz would comply with this if Moscow attacks.

But Biden refused to say that America would send forces to defend Ukraine. Modern weapons, including British anti-armour missiles, have been sent lately to Ukraine; and Nato countries, including UK, have training teams in the country. Ukraine is an associate but not a full partner of Nato. At a critical Nato summit in Bucharest in Spring 2008, Nato put off, but did not discard, requests by Ukraine and Georgia to join the alliance. President George W Bush was keen that they should be admitted, but Britain and Germany argued they should not for the time being.

This ambiguity, plus the training and weapons for Ukrainian forces, is conceived by Putin as a “direct threat to Russia, and Russian territory.” In July, he issued a rambling essay claiming that Ukraine and Belarus historically were at the heart of the Russian nation; and they are all part of the same country and culture. A recent opinion poll announced by the Italian institute ISPI shows that only 14% of Ukrainians agree in any way with Putin’s mystical notions of nationhood.  

This means that if Russia invades, its forces will face a long guerrilla war of resistance. The separatists they support in two districts of Donbas, Luhansk and Donetsk, are not having an easy time – despite copious and increasingly obvious support from Russian military advisers. They have recently been hit by strikes from Bayraktar 2b drones acquired by Ukrainian forces from Turkey.

The Russian forces now massing on the Ukrainian borders opposite Donbas and to the north opposite Kharkiv have an increasingly offensive posture. They are now being reinforced by long range artillery and rockets as well as heavy armour. According to an intelligence picture and maps obtained by the Washington Post, Russian forces will have roughly 100 Battalion Tactical Groups – BTGs – are expected to be battle ready by 1 January. Recently BTGs have been assembling in Crimea and opposite Belarus from the Yelnya sector in Russia.

One sign that they mean business is the recent readying of field hospitals and equipment and vehicles for frontline battle casualty clearing stations. According to the Washington Post’s analysis, a further 100,000 Russian reservists have been put on standby. In all it makes up a force of around four times the current strength of the British army.

Despite such a mighty presence of boots, bayonets, rockets, artillery and tanks on the ground, it is hard to work out what this force can do. It would be very difficult to attack and occupy Ukraine as a whole. Even a push to the Dnieper river complex would be hard to sustain.

Some speculate that this is a deliberate manoeuvre of dodging and weaving, like a boxer, by Putin to scare Kiev, the Americans and Nato into major concessions. These might include a written treaty of neutrality to guarantee that Ukraine would never join Nato – nor, perhaps, the EU. This puts Biden in a real bind, according to the Portuguese diplomat and strategist Bruno Macaes.  Any such agreement, let alone signed document, would be fatal for Biden at home and abroad, and deeply damaging for Nato as a whole.

Another concession for Putin might be an agreement for autonomy and local self-government for the two heavily Russian populated districts of Luhansk and Donetsk.

Any serious fighting puts Putin in jeopardy. Russians don’t like body bags returning from disputes they don’t understand or care about. This is the legacy of the last major operation in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989, where 14,500 died and many more were severely injured. If Germany and the Western alliances of Nato and the EU suspend Nordstreem 2, it will hurt them first in the short term, but become hugely damaging to Putin in the medium to long term. He will try to make up by increasing sales of gas to China – but China doesn’t care for what he has been doing in Crimea and Ukraine since 2014. Besides Russia accounts for under 2.5% of China’s foreign investment and trade.

Putin is also facing a major crisis of credibility due to Covid-19. Vaccination has not gone well at home, and the Sputnik V vaccine export has not proved a world beater. There is active resistance to vaccine “green” passes and checks by QR code compliance. There are once more numerous and vociferous demonstrations across Russia and blanket criticism in the underground media, which the Kremlin cannot control.

The posturing and manoeuvring of such a huge force against Ukraine may prove a giant deception plan and bluff. If so, it comes at very high risk. A force of this size can only be kept at battle stations for a short period, especially in the winter. 

In using it to divert from unpopularity at home and the noise from the parts of the media he knows he can never reach, Putin may be about to fall into a trap of his own making – taking Ukraine with him.

“The people of Afghanistan do not deserve this,” tweeted Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in August.

Quite how and why they didn’t deserve the shambolic debacle to international intervention in Hosseini’s country is explained sharply, elegantly and brutally in The Ledger – Accounting for Failure in Afghanistan by Greg Mills and David Kilcullen. If you read no other book or account of the shameful American-led disaster, read this. It is not only one of the best books about the intervention in Afghanistan, but also on the whole business of stabilisation and security, the growing threat of sudden and devastating regional and communal wars.

Both authors are veterans of the international operation in Afghanistan, and Kilcullen, a former officer of the Australian army, has advised British and American commanders at the highest level. Mills was in the presidential palace as President Ashraf Ghani took flight, leaving behind his closest and most loyal staff. 

It needn’t have happened like this. 

The exit operation and evacuation of staff and dependents from Kabul was worse and more disorganised than the equivalent bailout from Saigon in 1975. Mills and Kilcullen contend, and with plenty of evidence, that the scuttle from Kabul is set to have more far-reaching consequences in global security, not least for the standing of the US and NATO, than the Vietnam debacle. 

The seeds of the disaster were sewn with the deal made in Doha in February 2020 between the Trump administration and a delegation of the Taliban, though quite how representative this was of the gang now in power in Kabul is questionable. 

The deal was that the international forces would be out altogether by September 2021, the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The Taliban would negotiate an interim government with the regime of Ashraf Ghani. There would be a truce and peaceful transition. If only.

The Americans did not consult the government in Kabul, nor any of the allies. It was cut and run – or rather run and cut. When the last of their forces left Bagram airbase, they released 5,000 Taliban militant prisoners, flew off with their last fighter jets and put out the lights on a timer twenty minutes later.

They did not even tell the Afghan general responsible for the multi-billion dollar base. 

Biden was as keen to get out as Trump, so he didn’t review, revise or perhaps even seriously assess the consequences of what he inherited from the dodgy Doha agreement. In 2003, the then Senator Biden, luminary of the Senate’s Foreign Affairs Committee stated, “the alternative to nation-building is chaos, that turns out bloodthirsty warlords, drug traffickers and terrorists.”

On 16 August this year, in his first comments on the Kabul debacle, he said, “Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation-building.” With supreme insouciance, Kamala Harris remarked, “the mission achieved what it set out to.” 

No American president, apart from George W Bush initially believed, or possibly even really understood, the complexities of Afghanistan and what their force was trying to do there. Mills and Kilcullen rightly point out that for many officials and commentators across the western world Afghanistan is a bundle of clichés. It was never really a nation, but a collection of rival tribes and factions, it is fueled by a drug economy and it is irredeemably corrupt. The two authors say all such assumptions are wrong, as the real gains in social, educational, health reforms over the past twenty years show.

Now Afghanistan is facing mass starvation, the upheaval and flight of refugees to Pakistan and Iran especially – threatening the stability of both. Pakistan’s military and ISI intelligence agency had planned the sophisticated phasing of the Taliban’s summer offensive – Mills and Kilcullen spell this out clearly. Yet now as hundreds of thousands of refugees and fugitives from famine head south, the security and stability of Pakistan is in question. 

Quite why and how things fell apart so dramatically this summer has been explained in an article by the former commander of forces in Helmand, and briefly tasked to defend Kabul as it was falling, the British educated General Sami Sadat. In an article in the New York Times on 25 August this year, he says; “I am exhausted. I am frustrated. I am angry.” 

The Afghan forces were betrayed, let down by three factors. First, the Doha deal was a sell-out, as both regime Trump and Biden knew. Second, from the beginning of this year the 17,000 foreign contractors and maintainers that kept the Afghan planes and helicopters flying, and communications systems and drones running were pulled out. This meant almost none of the Afghan forces’ 200 far-flung bases could be reinforced and resupplied. “The Taliban fought with snipers and improvised explosive devices, while we lost aerial and laser-guided weapons capacity.” This view was endorsed by the former US commander David Petraeus to the House of Commons last month. Once the Afghans lost resupply facilities and air support, especially by drone and helicopter, they were finished.

Biden said that Americans were fighting in a war – losing no casualties in the eighteen months prior to this August – “that Afghan forces are not willing to fight themselves”. Afghan military and police have lost 60,000 dead in the past ten years or so, and this summer were taking casualties, killed and wounded, at 5,000 a month.

The third cause for collapse according to General Sadat is the rampant corruption across the Afghan military and government as a whole. He should have added that the Americans bought into it freely at times – with a view perhaps that Kabul may be a kleptocracy, but at least it’s our kleptocracy. The Karzai and Ghani presidencies were egregiously corrupt – ironically in 2008, Ghani co-authored a book with Clare Lockhart called Fixing Failed States. In the end, his own failed state fixed him.

The Ledger should be read alongside the brilliant critique of the crazy-paving path of British and Dutch planning and execution of operations in southern Afghanistan, the opium areas of Helmand and Uruzgan – Inescapable Entrapments by Mirjam Grandia Mantas, a colonel in the Dutch Army who served two tours in Afghanistan. The two books are the stand-out critiques of the whole international imbroglio in Afghanistan. 

Colonel Grandia’s main contention is that the Dutch and UK military were asked to do jobs they weren’t configured or trained to do. Their mission was messed up by meddling and hubristic politicians, think Tony Blair and John Reid, and their close coterie of advisers who knew almost nothing of Afghanistan. She, too, focuses on corruption and weak governance at the centre – a fatal flaw in all such stabilisation operations. You cannot get anywhere if you try to work with such crapulous and corrupt setups like the Thieu regime or the Karzai-Ghani presidencies of Vietnam. This was pointed out as far back as 1988 in a brilliant book, Dangerous Paradigms, by D Michael Shafer – a mentor and collaborator with Mirjam Grandia. 

Now Afghanistan is facing famine after yet another epic drought this summer. This is results from the change in climate – especially from the system of glaciers from the huge mountain chain from the Hindu Kush to the Himalayas and the Karakoram. The Taliban offensive is one of the clearest examples to date of conflict conditioned and accelerated by climate change. Crops from pomegranate to wheat failed and desperate villagers turned to the only point of authority, and perhaps protection, they could find – the Taliban.

The debacle in Afghanistan has put a huge question mark over the capabilities and effectiveness of NATO, still the most important western alliance. The coalition forces in Afghanistan never worked as a coalition. It was an all-American show, with the allies offered bit parts if they were lucky. 

Not only are millions of innocent Afghans now facing privation and starvation, but the violent internationalist terrorists and subversives are back, principally the Islamic State Khorasan. They are even threatening the Taliban, as well as more general global jihad.   

The Ledger is timely because international alliances and their function need a reset. Whatever Biden and Harris may babble about “nation-building” being for the birds, international alliances like NATO and UNO will have to do stabilisation, security and recovery missions – and over and again – in the future. 

In learning how things have gone so badly wrong in places like Afghanistan, and how we can operate more practically in the future, there can be no better introduction than Mills and Kilcullen’s wise words in The Ledger.

But as Clausewitz knew, there should be a warning attached. Military plans tend not survive the first few moments of contact with the enemy. Most of the big UK strategic reviews, and defence white papers have been overtaken within a year or so. Most famously the John Nott white paper ‘The Way Ahead’ of 1981 was blown apart by the Falklands conflict a year later – and that forced a reversal in cuts and a re-orientation to a less continental and more oceanic defence and security policy.            

The Blair Strategic Defence Review , devised by the then defence secretary George Robertson, of 1998 was thrown into turmoil by the strategic shock of the 9/11 attacks. They ushered in two decades of on-off conflict in Iraq, and Afghanistan, compounded by the churn of communal wars across Syria and Libya, and the waging of self-styled ‘ambiguous warfare and conflict’ by Russia in Crimea and the Donbas region of Ukraine.           

The Future Soldier plan is a flexible approach with affordable forces to this familiar unstable global context. The British Army is to be capable of basing forward and adaptable units to trouble spots. To enable this a string of ‘hubs’ are being set up for training bases and depots of forward deployed equipment. They cover five continents, and a dozen countries from Germany, Poland and Estonia, to Cyprus, Oman, Kenya, Brunei, Belize, Canada, the Falklands, to say nothing of strategic islands such as Ascension and Diego Garcia. 

The Army is to be cut from its present standing strength of 82,500 to 73,000 – not a great sacrifice as such because it is roughly around 75,000 fully trained strength at present. But altogether some 10,000 posts are to be cut.The size of units is to be reduced – battalions and companies will be smaller.But there are several pluses to this. Training opportunities will be wider, and many of the new skills in cyber, sophisticated communications, managing the digitized battlefield will be highly adaptable for opportunities in civilian life.            

The Army is now noticeably better educated that it was, say 30 years ago when it acquitted itself so well in the highly equivocal peace support role in Bosnia, to say nothing of the slog of security in support of the police for more than 30 years in Operation Banner in Northern Ireland.            

Altogether some £46 billion is to be committed to the Army over the next ten years according to defence secretary Ben Wallace, who announced the new blueprint to parliament on Thursday. It is the Army part of the strategic plan announced in the Integrated Review , followed by the Defence Command white paper, this Spring. The money will go a long way, but the programmes will be costly – as defence inflation rates are generally much higher than those registered in the mainstream RPI calculation. The problems of the highly expensive armoured  reconnaissance, command and communications vehicle Ajax are still far from resolved. The programme has already cost over £3 billion. Ben Wallace said it will take till 2030 before the UK can field a fully digitized armoured division.           

The most eyecatching element of the new list of units and capabilities is the new Special Operations Brigade, with a 1200 strong Ranger Regiment at its core. The regiment has four battalions each with four ‘company’ Ranger combat teams. Each of these units  is about 60 strong – almost a third of the strength of a traditional British Infantry company.            

They are designed to work like the US Green Beret Ranger units – which came to fame in Vietnam. They work alongside allied units to mentor and train them in hot spots – and if necessary fight alongside them.            

This is where the Future Soldier project becomes the Back to the Future Soldier plan. Talking to one of the first fully trained Ranger Combat teams earlier this week, it sounded very much that they were configured for the last wars , in Afghanistan and Iraq, as much as for what clashes the future may bring.            

In Afghanistan small teams of British soldiers served as Operational Mentoring and Liaison Teams – inevitably known as ‘omelets’ . They were often in tight corners, facing imminent danger from several direction at once, not least from mutinous troops they were training. At times they got caught in deadly close combat against superior Taliban numbers.            

The Rangers have both an up and a down side. They are elite, well trained, and highly adaptable. But they are vulnerable against cunning enemies like the Taliban insurgents who know how to operate beneath what is known as the ‘threshold of sophistication’ of such troops. The crude Taliban tactics – IED bombs costing a few dollars and suicide bomb attacks by swarms of fanatics – neutralize all the advantages of sophisticated surveillance, thermal imagery, and drones.            

Tomorrow’s wars and insurgencies will not necessarily follow the pattern of the conflicts of today and yesterday. Weird weather, continuing pandemics and environmental mutation, will produce upheaval and panic. We are already seeing the effect of mass uncontrolled migration. In such scenarios security will require mass deployment of forces. Robust security forces will need a capacity to deploy, and reinforce, in numbers – especially as allies may not always be on hand to help.           

Resilience is a key element to managing security operations – especially in instances and settings of what the Russians now call ‘ambiguous war’ such as in Donbas, Belarus, the Caucasus and round the Eastern Mediterranean from Turkey to Libya. Resilience means managing security over a long period, without necessarily coming to blows, as on the borders of Poland and the Baltic Republics.           

Resilience is also a key element to what the Army and the forces must offer here in UK, in the changing reality of homeland security – witness the crucial role they have played in Covid vaccination strategies, and making up shortfalls in hospital and supply chain services. They will be required to provide a permanent backup to first and second responders across a spectrum of foreseeable emergencies  from energy outages, weird weather effects in flooding especially, and breakdowns in infrastructure, as well as hard power security against attacks by subversives and terrorists.            

This is recognised in the new Army plan with the innovation of a new brigade of reserve forces with homeland security as its prime role. This time the government must support the reserves with more than lip service. Previous reviews have accorded the reserves a prominent role, but then failed to provide money, incentives and support. Reservists are now crucial to making the Future Soldier project work altogether. They provide critical mass – bringing Army numbers to more than 100,000 if fully recruited.           

But this time round the government is more than ever obliged to pay and train the reserves adequately. They must make them appreciated by both their military and civilian employers , which hasn’t happened in the past. The reserves may prove the key to the credibility of the Future Soldier initiative altogether.

For many of the governments it has been a spectacular u-turn. The Minister of Health in Denmark announced last August that “Covid-19 is no longer a critical threat to society.” Last week Denmark announced new lockdown provisions, including the need to show a vaccination pass at bars and pubs and sports meetings of more than 2,000.

For three nights in a row cities and villages across the Netherlands saw rioting, stoning and burning. This included a rock being thrown at an ambulance carrying a patient in the Hague, and a primary school burned down in the southern town Roosendaal. In Enschede the biggest city facing the German border, the mayor imposed an overnight curfew after rioting and burning on Saturday night. 

In Brussels, a demonstration against vaccination passes and a new lockdown drew up to 35,000. By dusk it had turned violent with attacks on police with fireworks and Molotov cocktails. 

President Macron warned on Monday of a ‘serious emergency’ in the French dependencies of Guadeloupe and its neighbour Martinique in the Caribbean. Guadeloupe had seen three days and nights of rioting and looting, and the resident police force were in danger of being overwhelmed. Macron has ordered the immediate despatch of 200 specialist Gendarmes and 50 special forces troops. Both islands have a low level of vaccination with only 37% of adults receiving jabs.

The common thread to the riots is protest against new lockdowns, the requirement for public sector employees to be vaccinated and the re-imposition of vaccination ‘green’ passes. Rioters in Vienna were angered by the closing of bars and restaurants for the next three weeks. The government has also said it is considering passing a law compelling public employees to be vaccinated. 

Germany, the Netherlands, Croatia, Italy and Denmark are facing a sudden surge in the number of Covid cases. This is putting further strain on hospital services – in Berlin and Vienna government officials have warned about the possibility of the public health services being overwhelmed, especially if the Covid crisis is compounded by a winter influenza epidemic. 

The European regional director of the WHO, Dr Hans Kluge, told the BBC this weekend that new restrictive measures were required to stem the surge. This mean new measures insisting on the wearing of masks, vaccinations and vaccination passes were needed, or “half a million new Covid deaths could be recorded (in Europe) by the Spring.” 

Denmark seemed to have had the pandemic under control – with a much lower rate of Covid deaths than either the US or the UK. At the beginning of this month the US had recorded 2,303 Covid deaths per million, the UK 2,126, and Denmark only 471 have died per million population. In a slightly complacent feature article last week in the New York Times, three researchers for the Danish HOPE project, looking into the social impact of Covid-19, suggested that Denmark was sufficiently cohesive socially to accept new pandemic restrictions with good grace.

The three, Rebecca Adler-Nissen, Sune Lehmann, and Andreas Roepstorff, said they had worked from 400,000 questionnaires and responses from Danes. The replies suggested that Denmark benefited from three outstanding characteristics. Denmark is one of the highest trust societies in the world – with over 90% consensus and support of public institutions, in health, schools and local government. Second, it has a compact political spectrum with a broad consensus across mainstream parties and political factions. 

Third, write the analysts, is a factor summed up by the almost untranslatable Danish quality of samfundssind meaning a special quality of ‘community spirit,’ and ‘mucking in together.’ In truth it all sounds a bit like a sub plot from the Scandi television drama ‘Borgen’, based around government intrigue in Copenhagen – a surprise hit, of which we are lucky enough to be getting a fourth series in UK soon.

However, Danish trust, cross-party consensus and community support got a punch in the guts from the Covid crisis with what has become known as ‘Minkgate.’ Last year the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, ordered all the country’s mink to be slaughtered immediately – as they were understood to carry and spread a virulent mutation of the Delta variant of the virus. In all about 11 million animals were killed out of a population of about 17 million – and the industry was destroyed.

It has subsequently transpired that the government had no authority to make such an order. The minister of agriculture resigned. The compensation bill is thought to top $3 billion – and Ms Frederiksen is due to be grilled about it all by a joint session of parliament next month.

Despite the high trust, balanced politics and community samfundssind, Danes did some pretty spectacular rioting over Covid restrictions at the weekend. Their casus belli for attacking police and throwing fireworks and bricks is likely to be much deeper than rage about another lockdown, and vaccination passes. 

The case is more explicit in the Netherlands which has been under a light touch lockdown for a fortnight already. One of the most bizarre incidents occurred on the island of Urk, a small island connected by causeway in the Ijsselmeer – or Zuider Zee in old geography. Urk has a small deeply conservative population in what is known as Holland’s Bible-belt. When I visited a few summers back it seemed also to be a favourite spot for gay summer tourism. Last week a club called ‘t Bun insisted on Covid vaccination or immunity passes before allowing use of its swimming pool. Overnight the walls were daubed with messages ‘unvaccinated forbidden’ and ‘Nazis welcome.’ Urk has the lowest vaccination rate in the Netherlands at only 32% of the population. Saturday saw a full blown riot on the island, with 16 arrests.

Elsewhere, the Covid riots have been adopted by extremists supporting much of the racist posturings of the Forum for Democracy movement founded by the self-styled philosopher-politician Thierry Baudet. It is a frankly populist nationalist party, subject to various successes and splits since it began campaigning eight years ago. It appeals to many of the rioters with its nativist, and sometimes flagrantly anti-semitic slogans. Some supporters openly speak about a Jewish conspiracy to bring immigrants into Europe, such as those now on the Poland-Belarus border.

The Dutch prime minister, and Rotterdam’s dynamic mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb, Dutch born and ethnically Moroccan, have been baffled by the extremely sophisticated tactics of the rioters. In Rotterdam the mayor had to sanction police using live ammunition ‘since lives are at stake.’ “The problem is that there are now almost professional rioters. They plan their activities from out of the way, obscure places,” says Mirjam, herself  professional security sector analyst.

“These rioters take things a step further. They are extremely frustrated – they meet up in not very obvious places – like the southern town of Eindhoven, for example. They challenge to get a police response – they plan their protests to manipulate violence. The prime minister has spoken of the difficulty of keeping track of them.” This weekend groups of Covid rioters broke into crowds to start fighting at two football matches.  

Some academics see the anti-authoritarian stance of the Covid rioters as merging eventually with the opinions of the most hardline climate change deniers. “Ideology is the enemy of technology,” says Bruno Macaes, the polymath geopolitical thinker. He depicts the two strands interweaving in his new essay, “Geopolitics for the End of Time.” 

Covid has been midwife to our new age of uncertainty. Pathologies and patterns are more understood than eighteen months ago, but where the pathogen goes next is an open question, most virologists seem to suggest. From a geopolitical perspective, there are still huge blanks in the story. Russia, for example, appears to be suffering terribly as hospital and medical services are threadbare to non-existent in so much of the vast territory. Hence we get Vladimir Putin’s nervousness and anxiety to distract attention to a string of tricks and feints along the borders, rather than what is going on inside his country. China’s claim to achieve a state of ‘Covid-zero’ still appears a boast with almost now credible supporting evidence. Finally the effect of Covid through most of Africa and Latin America, is largely a blank sheet. Equally little is known of the hot conflict zones such as Afghanistan, Yemen, Sudan and sub-Saharan Africa. 

We may not yet be half way through the pandemic caused by this bout of Covid-19/SARS02 variant. Subliminally we may be haunted by the notion of that the great pandemic of H1N1, known as Spanish Flu, burnt out mysteriously after two major waves in Europe between summer 1917 and summer 1922. As Sir Paul Vallance and Prof Chris Whitty, the two senior UK scientific officials on the case, pointed out recently ‘the political timetable doesn’t coincide with the rhythms of scientific discovery and developments. The one demands and immediate turn round of decision and result – the other is a journey into the unknown of unpredictable fortune and outcome.

Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, has said he thought the UK, England particularly, was well placed to be ahead of the curve in the eventuality of a fourth surge in the pandemic this winter. Let’s hope his finger are well crossed.

“Britain has clear historical responsibility for everything that has happened in the region since.”

This was in response to the demand from the foreign secretary Liz Truss that Vladimir Putin do something to alleviate the plight of thousands of refugees being pushed from Belarus to the razor wire of the Polish border. Many are now camped in a no-man’s land with little food and shelter, and in temperatures well below zero.

Britain and allies are sending military engineers to help the Polish army on the border. Fears have been raised, not least by the outgoing UK services’ chief General Sir Nick Carter, that war could break out by accident on the Polish border, and most worryingly in the Donbas region of Ukraine where Russia currently has around 100, 000 troops massed for “exercises.”

The Biden administration has also said that a full blown clash between Nato and Russian and Belarus forces could happen within a matter of hours.

How likely is it that we are going to get another round of eccentric or “asymmetric” conflict in either or both of the two sectors – the Belarus – Poland border and Donbas in Ukraine ?

The two fronts are connected in Russian strategy, but how much Moscow controls the eccentric and wayward Alexander Lukashenko and his regime in Minsk is open to question. Russia has sent in military and paramilitary forces to help out – but for the most part Putin’s backing for the former Soviet pig farming collective boss has been less than full hearted. His regime lacks credibility following the continuous protests and rumblings since the autocrat claimed re-election last year.

Belarus is important  — not least because of its status as Russia’s only ally in Eastern and Central Europe. But increasingly Belarus, which still looks like part of the Soviet Union, is resembles a satrapy of the Putin regime rather than a country in its own right. For Putin it is part of Russia, culturally and spiritually.

By singling out the UK and to an extent Poland as being responsible for the current border mess, the Russian propagandists seem to have been cadging the punchline of Anne Robinson – You Are the Weakest Link. Poland and Britain are the EU’s bad boys, inside and outside the tent. Russia knows this and plays on it.

So far the UK military support on the ground to Poland, Ukraine, Estonia and the Baltics has been little more than nugatory. Ben Wallace is now on his way to Poland to see what more can be done. A new defence and security agreement between London and Kiev is in the pipeline – as Reaction revealed last week. This is likely to mean more arms sales and training packages, adding to those already in place.

General Carter was warning that Russia, its allies and the Nato allies risk tripping over the elaborately laid tripwires – if only by accident. There are a lot of forces, formal and informal, deployed across the region. According to some reports, the armoured infantry and tanks could roll across the border into the three Donbas provinces of Ukraine within a matter of hours.

“I don’t think Russia intends to invade Ukraine,” says Charles Hacker, CEO of Control Risks, one of the foremost security experts in the commercial sector. “Deployment into Ukraine carries high risk – and Putin has achieved his aim so far – the destabilisation of Ukraine, so it can’t join the EU or Nato in the near future. The alliances don’t want Ukraine now.”

“For Putin and Russia, Donbas has to be managed,” says Rupert Smith, one of the UK’s foremost military strategists. Russian actions over Ukraine in Donbas have been a partial failure, he says, ever since the Maidan Revolution in Kiev in 2014 which ousted the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovich. In the same way, the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 looks like only a partial win for Putin.

The presence of the Russian troops doesn’t of itself mean serious intent. Similar forces have massed at this point earlier in the year, only to disperse. The reporting from the ground isn’t detailed enough to understand clearly what comes next. So far there is no sign of field hospitals and casualty clearing stations being built close to the border – and they would be needed quickly if a serious invasion is planned.

Commentators have described this as “asymmetric warfare” or “gray zone” confrontation activity. General Rupert Smith thinks that the Russians’ own term is more useful: “ambiguous warfare.” This means continuously ratcheting up and ratcheting down tension moving up and down a scale from competition to confrontation, near combat even, and then back down again.

Russia doesn’t hold all the cards – though it pretends to. It knows Europe wants its gas – but knows, too, that this is an old-fashioned commodity which will be in decreasing demand over the coming decades. It cannot control the market on its own terms. This makes Alexander Lukashenko’s boast that he’ll turn off the gas piped through Belarus somewhat bizarre. It isn’t his gas in the first place, and it isn’t his political call in the second place. Russia isn’t entirely successful in blackmailing the smallest and poorest East European state, Moldova, over gas supplies.

Russia is threatening to make mischief on Europe’s borders to mask difficulties at home, according to Nato strategists, and independent observers in Moscow itself according to reports in today’s International New York Times. Covid is not under control, and is adding to the continuing restiveness in the eastern Asiatic areas of the Russian Federation. Commitments in the Caucasus – peacekeeping in Nagorno Karabakh especially – and open-ended support for the Assad dictatorship in Syria are burdensome.

Putin’s autocratic regime seems firm – but the Russian state as presently constituted is dependent on his personal rule. When he falters or falls, it goes too.

The deployment of the 100,000 troops of the tank and armoured infantry battalions on the borders with Donbas seem the elegant proof and fine metaphor for what is going on. These are the last few days of autumn weather suitable for large ground training exercises.

Then comes winter when tracks freeze and break, and if you are not careful diesel engines wax up – to say nothing of human performance if the temperatures take a sudden plunge.

The next phase of the face-off on Europe’s eastern marches is just a few days from now. And it may just be time for all to hunker down – until Spring appears.

On Monday we got the publication of the Public Accounts Committee Report on “Improving the performance of major defence equipment contracts”. The committee under the redoubtable Dame Meg Hillier MP did not mince its words. The system of defence procurement is “broken” and probably has been for years. Nine out of the top 13 major equipment procurements are on amber or even red signals – Whitehall-speak for saying they are hitting or have hit the buffers. Some cannot be rescued.

This has produced a needless cost to taxpayers of billions. Last year the Defence Department was awarded a real increase in its budget of £16.5 billion. The Public Accounts Committee states that there is no guarantee that this won’t be used to plug existing gaps in the accounts, or squandered further on existing programmes.

The PAC suggests there is something fundamentally flawed in the culture of the Ministry of Defence, and raises serious questions as to why successive governments, Labour and Conservative, have allowed matters to drift. There have now been 13 reports from the National Audit Office querying the conduct of major projects, including the aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, the F-35 fighter, and a whole gaggle of army fighting vehicles still not fit for purpose.

One ugly little practice is to postpone existing programmes and contracts, only to incur greater cost when the equipment is delivered much later than originally planned. The new Protector strike drones, state of the art machines bought from the United States, have been deliberately delayed, incurring a further, and unnecessary, cost of £326 million. The analyst Francis Tusa, of Defence Analysis, calculates that the MoD is currently wasting well over £1 billion a year on unnecessary charges and delay fees.

The two shockers illustrated by the admirably succinct PAC report are the Crowsnest Airborne Early Warning System for the new aircraft carriers, and the Ajax Armoured Reconnaissance Vehicle – on which £4 billion has already been spent. So far only 14 vehicles have been delivered for trials – and from those trials more than 300 soldiers have been treated for serious hearing injuries from excess noise and vibration.

Already £4 billion has been spent, £3.1 billion going to the manufacturer General Dynamics UK, all out of an overall lifelong costing of £5.5 billion. Senior officers think there is little prospect of the vehicle, effectively a 40-ton light tank, ever functioning fully. Writing the project off, now regarded as probable rather than possible by much of the Army, will be the most costly ditching of a British defence project since David Cameron binned the failing Nimrod MRA4 maritime patrol aircraft in 2010. That cost about £1 billion, a quarter of the Ajax bill.

Ajax was based on a Spanish prototype which was unproven – and largely a paper concept. The Spanish forces didn’t order it in the end. The MoD went for the Ajax because it didn’t want to favour the more obvious candidate, the CV90, because it is made by Bae Systems – whose role in defence procurement was becoming too dominant some Whitehall mandarins feared. The CV90 made originally by Hagglunds–Bofors, now part of Bae, has been hugely successful and gone through several upgrades with a dozen armies. Meanwhile the Army and MoD bodged the Ajax, adding armour and kit so a light vehicle of around 25 tons now weighs well over 40.

The Crowsnest, a kit fitted first to the Sea King Mark 7 helicopter, is a vital piece of early warning radar apparatus for the aircraft carriers. A much needed update has been delayed a further two years, no doubt at further cost.

The PAC says more or less that the MoD’s accounting and procurement should now be put into special measures. It should be audited by the Treasury and Cabinet Office, and reported on every six months.

It has put its finger on a very real difficulty. There are too few dedicated experts in the relevant departments, and a culture of gifted amateurism seems to waft through the department – as it does in parts of the three armed services. Senior reporting officers on major projects need to be in post for at least four or five years, rather two or three at present – and it should be seen as a major career path whether you wear a uniform or suit. The idea that a former Permanent Secretary such as Sir Stephen Lovegrove, could do a simple transfer to become the National Security Adviser seems almost risible. No wonder former senior commanders like Lord David Richards think the job and the National Security Council are a busted flush.

The NSC and the NSA himself have been cruelly exposed by the debacle in Afghanistan – they didn’t see it coming and don’t seem to appreciate its consequences.

But the problems of the Army don’t stop there. It is ill equipped – largely through not planning sufficiently beyond Afghanistan and Iraq. Today it cannot fulfill a commitment to supply Nato with a fully equipped strike brigade to the best current standards for another two years.

Worse, there are now serious questions about morale and discipline. These are highlighted by the grim circumstances of the suicide of a young female officer cadet from Sandhurst and the allegations of the murder of a Kenyan mother by carousing troops then on exercise in the country. Both enquiries are ongoing.

The legacy of Afghanistan is important and must be addressed. Other armies are already doing this, but the British seem incapable of mounting a transparent and productive exercise of lessons learned.  The Dutch parliament is doing this very thing next week.

The problem outlined in the brilliant study of British, Dutch, and Canadian governments and forces for operations in Southern Afghanistan by Lt Col Mirjam Grandia Mantas of the Netherlands Army is that military forces were asked to undertake tasks and roles in Afghanistan for which they were not trained and were inappropriate. The central problem was mitigating fragile governance – which the allies, the Americans especially, were incapable of addressing.

In a review of Colonel Grandia Mantas’s book “Inescapable Entrapments”, the brilliant American strategist and geopolitical analyst D Michael Shafer – author of the ground-breaking “Deadly Paradigms” – points to a fundamental problem for the armed services and the Ministry of Defence. “Most frighteningly, the book suggests they understand the world in which they (and their foes) wield their weapons, despite the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that suggest they represent the future.”

To which Col Grandia adds, “I don’t think our leadership appreciates the complexity and variability of the environment in which they have to work.

“The most telling symptom of this is that they keep telling you what they know, and appear unwilling to be questioned. They purport to be uncurious about what they don’t know, and need to.”

The warning came as the UN Security Council is due to renew the mandate for the 700 strong EU peacekeeping force in the country. However, Russia and China are hinting they’ll veto the mandate. 

The echoes of the recent violent past have been conjured by the declaration of the head of the Serb entity in the state, Milorad Dodik. He has previously been head of the presidency council, which rotates between leaders from the three main ethnic communities, the Bosniak Muslims, Serbs, and Croats.

Dodik has been training a separate corps of Serb paramilitary police and has said the Serb part of the federation will withdraw altogether, and insist on its own autonomy. The Serbs belong to the Republika Srpska, whereas the Croats and predominantly Muslim Bosniaks work together in their own Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. 

Bosnia has been enjoying an uneasy peace since 1995, when agreement at Dayton Ohio brought three and a half years of civil war to a truce. The deal, which underpins the present state of Bosnia, has proved shaky at best – larded with resentment from both the Serb and Croat communities. 

The sense of Serb betrayal has been compounded by the fact that their principal political and military leaders in the conflict, which may have taken more than 200,000 lives, ended up before the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. Dr Radovan Karadzic, the political head of the early self-declared Republika Srpska, and his military opposite General Ratko Mladic were both sentenced for war crimes and genocide. Slobodan Milosevic died while still undergoing trial in The Hague. All three are still seen as martyrs and national heroes by some Serbs to this day. 

This sense of resentment partly explains the support for Milorad Dodik’s push for autonomy for the Bosnian Serbs, and possibly the breakup of the present state of Bosnia. Bosnia itself has applied for membership of the EU. But Dodik has warned he has “powerful friends” in the wings – meaning the Serbs in Belgrade and Putin’s Russia. He also may have some sympathy and support from the Croat HDZ, the centre-right majority party in neighbouring Croatia, which has a powerful affiliate representing the Croats of Bosnia.

As well as threatening to veto the renewal of the Sarajevo peace force, the Russians are pressing the UN Security Council to ignore or downgrade the report of the current High Representative, Christian Schmidt of Germany, warning of incipient conflict because of the activities of the separatist Serbs under Milorad Dodik.

This is seen as deliberate meddling by Putin to undermine both the EU and Nato in Europe by critics such as Baroness Arminka Helic, the former Bosniak Muslim refugee who sits as a Conservative in the House of Lords. In this Russia has form. In 2016 the Kremlin was revealed to be behind an attempted coup in neighbouring Montenegro.“ There are alarming echoes of the 1990s sweeping across the Western Balkans,” Arminka Helic writes in Politico this week.

Russia continues to destabilise in Kosovo and Montenegro as well as Bosnia. Helic is particularly critical of the Serbian government in Belgrade, which, she says, “is actively backing efforts to destabilise them (i.e. all three states), supporting internal proxies, and threatening their sovereignty and territorial integrity.

“Coupled with Russian meddling, EU division and Nato weakness, this proving to be a lethal mix.”

Bosnia is now one of the great zombie neo-conflicts of the European and Mediterranean neighbourhood – along with the likes of Ukraine, Ossetia, and Nagorno Karabakh. They can burst into open conflict at any time, and the fire is likely to spread.

Bosnia sits on one of the great geo-cultural faultlines since the Age of Antiquity in Europe. It marked the border between the Roman Empires of the East and West. This bled into the division between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic communities, still evident across the country. But then came the Ottoman Turks and Islam. The ultra-nationalist propaganda of Serb and Croat paints the Bosniak Muslims as interlopers, invading Turks or turncoat Serbs converted to Islam for political advantage. It must be observed that some of the most distinguished of the Sultans of the Sublime Porte, the court in Istanbul, were of Bosnian and Balkan origin.

From Ottoman times, Bosnia, like Kosovo and parts of Bulgaria, and enclave of the Sandjak of Novi Pazar in Serbia, is one of the historic centres of Muslim populations in southern Europe.

Bosnia mirrors much of the story of Yugoslavia and its constituent people over the last century and a half. Serbs, Croats, Bulgars, Romanians and Greeks fought for identity and independence over much of that period, and the coals of resentment still glow to this day. The losers were the Muslims as the Ottoman Turk influence retreated and declined. They were deprived of recognition when Bosnia emerged under Austrian tutelage at the Congress of Berlin in 1878. 

Fatally, this led to the outright annexation of Bosnia to Austria-Hungary in 1908 – and six years later a young Bosnian Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip shot dead the Austrian imperial heir, Franz Joseph, in Sarajevo on the Serb national day.

In the ensuing war, the Serbs would lose up to a quarter of their population. The Second World War also brought a strong element of inter-community fighting along ethnic lines. This has to be pointed out, as it is still present in the growing tensions of today. The Serbs depict themselves as the holders of the title to much of the Bosnian lands – baptised by the sacrifice of their blood in the more lurid portrayals of the national myth. The Muslims are interlopers, turncoats, who are staking claim by superior birth rate.

Today the Bosnian population of just over three and a half million is 50 per cent Bosniak, 30 per cent Serb and around 15 per cent Croat – the rest a mix of Turk, Roma and mixed race. The Serbs have always looked to Moscow, their fellow slavs, for support – though often this has been rhetorical rather than substantial. The Croats claim alliance with Catholic Austrians and Germans.  The Bosniak Muslims are once again receiving support from Turkey, and since Dayton in 1995 Saudi Arabia and some Gulf countries.

Demography is a crucial and generally unacknowledged part in the perpetual crisis of the Balkans, and very much so today. Bosnia and the Western Balkans suffered devastating famines in the 17^th Century. So, as my colleague and friend Allan Little of the BBC always points out “to talk of ancient hatreds is nonsense – a lot of the population was all but wiped out three centuries or so ago.”

At 3.5 million today, the Bosnian population is at least 20 per cent smaller than it was in 1991, on the eve of the devastating communal war which broke out in April the following year – murder, mayhem and migration caused, and continues to cause, the drain of humanity. Romania and Bulgaria have suffered declining populations since the 1980s. The Serb population is also in decline, with a natality rate of around 1.48 – well below the 2.1 for population stability.

Against this background, the war of words of Milorad Dodik, the UN, and the EU High Representative Christian Schmidt becomes more ominous. It echoes what went on in the late 80s as Croats, Serbs and later Bosniaks sought autonomy and then independence. The wars of the dissolution of Yugoslavia spread their malign influences and poisons well beyond the Western Balkans. The EU, Nato, and OSCE need to take timely steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

The contrast in style and outlook between Draghi, 74, and Johnson is pretty glaring. Both are highly intelligent public performers, though in a very different way. Draghi, Jesuit-educated, has spent a lifetime in finance and banking, public and private, in Italy, at the EU level, and in the US at the World Bank and with Goldman Sachs.

He is now proving a surprising success as Prime Minister, since he was given the emergency commission to head a coalition of politicians and technocrats to tackle Italy’s toxic crisis compounded by Covid-19 and a pretty dreadful backstory of stagnation and debt.

His main aim is to regenerate Italy’s economy and bring in some much needed reform. He is tackling the creaking justice system – the law’s delay is an outrageous euphemism for the way many of the country’s courts work. He is also tackling the gender imbalance – especially at the higher levels of the professions and public service. (It is even rumoured that the next Italian ambassador to London is to be a woman for the first time).

Unlike previous bankers turned prime minister, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi and Mario Monti, Draghi has said that he doesn’t want to run for elected political office when his current mandate is up – on 1 May 2023 at the latest.

His main task is the distribution of the €200 billion rescue funds and loans, principally from the EU pot. He has set himself  around two years for the main job to be done – he says he doesn’t want to see elections until the full term of the present parliament is up in Spring 2023.  He is suggesting that then, like Cincinnatus in Ancient Rome, he will return to his plough.

He will then be 76 – and he may find that his country, Europe and the global economy still need his services.

Not that all is completely rosy in the Draghi prospectus. An old ghost has come back to haunt him this week with the continuing imbroglio of the Monte dei Paschi di Siena, Europe’s oldest merchant and trading bank. In recent times it has been a byword for political jobbery and incompetence. This week a sale to UniCredit Spa fell through – and Draghi has to authorise an injection of around €3bn to keep the bank alive. This in addition to €18 billion of rescue funds it has swallowed over the past 13 years or so.

It is a familiar story to Mario Draghi, and one he is well equipped to address. The surprise of the past six months is other skills he has shown in handling the machinations of Italy’s political parties, and is managing really difficult problems of hard power foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, East Mediterranean and North Africa, where Italy has vital interests.

“It is astonishing how he has pushed back both the right and the left,” observes Italian journalist Marco Niada. Matteo Salvini’s nationalist Lega, a partner in the Rome coalition government, suffered a serious setback in the recent crucial local and mayoral elections. So too with the leftist populist 5 Star Movement, which the former prime minister Giuseppe Conte is trying to knock into shape.

Curiously, this has met with a revival of fortunes of the centre left Democratic Party, PD, under a resurrected former leader, Enrico Letta. It is not without irony that Letta has recently been elected to parliament at a by-election in, of all places, Siena – home of the aforementioned troubled and crumbling Monte dei Paschi di Siena Spa.

Draghi’s first foreign visit as PM was to Libya, where Italy has been working overtime to sort out the tangle of foreign proxies and patrons in the on-off civil war. The main effort of diplomacy has been with Turkey, Egypt, UAE and, to an extent, the Russians.

With Turkey the tango has had an intriguing choreography. In an off the cuff remark, Draghi said President Erdogan’s rule was that of a “dictator”. Erdogan called Draghi an “unelected prime minister” in what purported to be a leading democracy. The feathers flew. Yet in the recent spat which led to Erdogan expelling 10 European ambassadors, seemingly now on pause, Italy was not on the list. “It’s all immensely skillful,” says Niada. “Draghi is opening up to Turkey as a vital partner in the Mediterranean mix now. It is a very big back story.”

The trajectory of Mario Draghi and his policies will be intriguing both at G20 and COP26. Those policies could even prove decisive. G20, unlike G7, will talk money and how the $100bn funding on energy reserves envisaged in the COP programme will be facilitated. At the Glasgow summit, Draghi’s fiscal and financial skills will carry real clout – it’s not a department in which Boris Johnson is expected to display similar expertise.

The crucial area for debate will be between Draghi, John Kerry the US climate envoy, Mark Carney for the UN, possibly Barack Obama – who will be present – and the representatives of Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping. It matters not that these two world leaders may not put in a physical appearance on the Clyde next week – what their counsellors say and do will be crucial to the mitigation of environmental and climate degradation. These discussions may have to go on into further rounds next year. It won’t all be done and dusted in one go at Glasgow.

Draghi will be the leading voice among EU leaders. But he does not wish to be seen as the EU leader, in a way once claimed for Angela Merkel, and so eagerly aspired to by Emmanuel Macron.

In an intriguing essay in the International New York Times last week, Professor Helen Thompson, explained why no one is likely to dominate the EU scene as Merkel did. Draghi’s Italy is at odds with both the Merkel legacy and the Macron approach on China which broadly favour cooperation, and collaboration on occasion, as opposed to competition or even confrontation.

Draghi is pulling Italy away from its previous leaning towards Chinese investment in anything from fashion and furnishing, communications and selling interests in key hubs such as the ports of Trieste and Genoa. He is urging investment into and from America instead.

The implication from Helen Thompson’s article is that Draghi is unlikely to entertain Macron’s Napoleonic leanings despite the new attempts to form a special alliance with the Italian Republic.

One small inconvenience in the Draghi in-tray is that Italy’s parliamentarians of both houses are due to elect a new President and head of State at the end of January. It is a largely ceremonial post but of growing influence. The President calls elections, summons prime ministers to form governments, and is head of the judiciary. He is the ultimate Fourth Official of Italian public life – duties that President Sergio Mattarella and his predecessor Giorgio Napolitano have discharged with adroitness – sometimes decisively so. They have both saved the political day and averted chaos by personal intervention.

It is suggested that Draghi be chosen next year. He has said he doesn’t want it. So might Mattarella, the present incumbent, be persuaded to stay on until the present government ends in Spring 2023, when Draghi steps down as PM? Neither man is biting at the idea.

Besides, making Draghi President of Italy might be a tremendous waste of his talents when they are needed most. The extraordinary gifts of intellect, drive and intuition are likely to be needed more urgently over the next few years by Italy, Europe and the eco-economy of the planet.

Reluctant memo to Mario Draghi, President of the Council of Ministers of the Italian Republic: forget about Cincinnatus and his plough.