Barry Turner

By Barry Turner Columnist

So, the inevitable has happened, President Putin has launched what is likely to be the most appalling war Europe has seen since 1945.

In an ignominious and flagrant breach of international law he has attacked a neighbouring state with full fury of a military superpower. Not only any old neighbouring state but one that has sharded its history, much of its culture and definitely much of it terrible hardship for centuries.

No amount of hyperbole is going to be ever enough to condemn this war crime — and war crime it is as defined in count one of the Nuremberg Indictment. The outcome for the people of Ukraine, not to mention the young men and women in Russian uniform is obvious, but this article is concerned with the fate of the perpetrator of this tragedy.

Vladimir Putin arrived on the world’s political stage in May 2000 after some months as acting president of post-Soviet Russia.  Ironically as the protege of the chaotic and frequently inebriated Boris Yeltsin, he ran on a ticket to end the corruption that Yeltsin himself had largely presided over. In the early years he achieved some success in that venture but as his power increased, he himself fell to the eternal curse that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

No one would have expected a former station chief of the KGB and director of its successor the FSB to have been much of a keen democrat, and the ever increasing corruption of the Russia that emerged from the former Soviet Union determined that his autocracy would take increasing hold in the country. This soon developed into the long established pretensions of the all-powerful, and he soon began to adopt the trappings, not of his Soviet predecessors but those of the long dead Czars of old Imperial Russia.

His strutting around the enormous halls of the Kremlin surrounded by his 18^th century attired Preobrazhynski Guard Regiment and his manipulating of the constitution to make him head of state for life. His absurd posturing shirtless on horseback and his action man image in fighter jets. His cosying up the patriarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church took him further and further down the fantasy pathway to Czardom.  It was very clear that he also was developing the paranoia and aggression that so many of his imperial forbears had in spades.

And now we have the ultimate expression of the pretence of being the Czar. A war of aggression against a neighbour, a country he claims as Russia’s natural satrap from the days of the Old Imperial Triune or as it was known “all the Russias” It is his stated ambition to restore this 19^th century empire as his legacy to the world, and he will stop at nothing, including inflicting misery on millions to achieve it.

During the Covid-19 pandemic the modern Czar has spent much time at his resort home in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, reading what he would call the history of Russia. Those of us who have spent many years as Russia watchers are very familiar with such stories, and they are more myth and legend than any history. A bit like the English stories of Robin Hood and King Arthur.  He has absorbed himself in this fantasy, and his pretensions and his paranoia have been nourished by them. He now sees himself in this imperial role and as an integral part in the glory of Russia.

He should perhaps have read the more realistic versions of Russian history that are far more fascinating than the silly romanticism of the volumes he has read from. He certainly should have looked at the history of the Czars, because so many of them ended their careers in nothing like the glory he now craves. That is almost certainly where he is now headed. He is far from the first all-powerful head of state or Czar of all the Russias.

All his predecessors had strong armies and an all pervasive secret police. All were surrounded by sycophants from Boyars, through Commissars to Oligarchs most came to sticky ends and it was rarely from without that the final blow was struck or the poison administered. Ivan the Terrible knew his enemies were those closest to him. Mr Putin should not look to Alexei Navalny as his nemesis, the real one is currently also creeping around the corridors of the Kremlin.

It won’t be tomorrow; it won’t be next week but one day he will have a short lapse of concentration and the blow will come. His successor is already in place. He (it is certainly a man) is waiting for the cue.

It’s there in the history books Vladimir, look it up while you still can.

Barry Turner is a Senior Lecturer in War Reporting and Human Rights and a member of the Royal United Services Institute.

By Barry Turner Columnist

The revelations go on. It’s getting to the stage that the news story is soon going to be about a day when there wasn’t a party. Wine fridges and sending for a carry-out, boozing at lunchtime and a febrile email traffic about the next ‘work related’ drinking session.

Dominic Cummings is now at the centre of the fray with his offers to take an oath and swear that Boris Johnson knew all along about the Bacchanalian life style of the governments special advisors and even may have encouraged it. There is of course the nagging doubt over this development. Mr Cummings has made solemn pledges before that have been broken and there is still that mater of his do-it-yourself eye-test during the first lockdown.

It is interesting that old Dominic feels the need to give testimony under oath about his knowledge of the parties. Of all people we would have to assume that he is in possession of a good number of those ‘bring a bottle’ emails. Why does he not just produce them? Well, there is still time and when better than just before Prime Minister’s Question Time in the House.

So, the Boris loyalists have come up with a cunning plan, the dead cat strategy as it has become known. Distraction politics to take the heat off and what is better than some real hard-nosed populist policies to achieve that? Hello! Operation Red Meat. Policies the public wants to hear, Boris at his best making the big promise. Round up the usual targets like migrants and the BBC. Never fails.

Except this time, it has. Two high profile Tories at least have dismissed the strategy for different reasons but dismissed it they have. Nadim Zahawi tells us that it’s all hot air, “government doesn’t work like that”. Andrew Bridgen says it’s only a restatement of manifesto pledges, nothing to see here at all folks. Behind the scenes the letters to Sir Graham Brady are waiting alongside their envelopes for Sue Gray to report.

So, what about the Red Meat, the true blue policies they did in fact sort of mention in the manifesto long before the stories of wine fridges appeared. What is it that is going to distract the public from the booziest workplace beyond the local brewery?

Let’s start with the BBC, a long time enemy of some of the more fevered minds in the Conservative Party.  A left-wing conspiracy biased, prejudiced and downright horrible to the licence payer.  Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries pleased the anti-BBC lobby on the back benches the other day with her announcement that the statement on the licence fee would be the last as an ominous threat, only the next day to say well actually she meant parliament was going to talk about it. A somewhat different point of view.

It is not that the BBC is not in need of some root and branch reorganisation and reform, it is, but the red meat in that statement turned out to of an inferior cut.

Onto the migrant crisis, always a good one to stir the faithful. The Navy is being brought in to ‘turn back’ the boats we were told. Images of plucky Jack Tars fighting off the advancing Armada of rubber dinghies just like Sir John Hawkins and Sir Francis Drake, under the command of Good Queen Bess did to those pesky Spaniards years ago. But not quite, apparently a few technical details got in the way.

 The United Kingdom is a signatory to international treaties on the law of the sea requiring its naval and merchant fleet to rescue ‘those in peril on the sea’ in other words there is a legal requirement to pick up people in distress at sea. We can of course do the trick of leaving such treaty agreements, but quite how that squares with our policy on China and its frequent treaty breaches is anybody’s guess.

So basically, we need to leave the ECHR and the UN to be able to do this. We also need to tear up all of these international treaties that would effectively make sea going trade virtually impossible for British ships. No state would allow our ships in their ports under those circumstances.

By what physical mechanism do we ‘turn back’ the boats. Some suggest pushing them back to France, sheer brilliance apart from a couple of minor technical problems. What do we think might happen if a powerful naval vessel pushes an outboard motor driven rubber boat?  If in that process refugees/migrants are killed or seriously injured, who gets to face the music? Well, we can be certain it will not be the clowns who dreamt this up, oh no, indeed it will be the sailors on the Navy vessels who will get court martialled.

There is of course the other minor detail in that Royal Navy ships cannot simply push the boats back to the French coast. There is the matter of French territorial waters to consider.

The government, for want of a better term, say this is to tackle the people smugglers. They are not of course on the boats and those that are have already paid for the ride. The people smugglers will be delighted with them being sent back to France; they can pay again for another attempt. In the case of migrants drowning as a result of such lunacy, the people traffickers do not give a monkey’s about that. So just about the only people this policy does not affect are the people smugglers.

But never fear what was going to be a turning back of the boats has rapidly morphed into the navy having a coordinating role in the Channel

We are told that all of those policy advisors in Number 10 are smart, white-hot intelligent people. They have devised this and other daft ideas as part of Operation Red Meat/ Save Big Dog! It sounds much more like the policies were devised after one of the now infamous booze-ups that seem to occur at the end of — and even in the middle of — every working day in Number 10.

Barry Turner is a Senior Lecturer in War Reporting and Human Rights and a member of the Royal United Services Institute.