Gavan Reilly: Instead of a prayer, the radio warned of a nuclear madman

Waking to the news of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last Thursday morning, I did what I often do on days where global news trumps national: I listened to BBC Radio 4. Regular listeners to its Today programme will know that, at 7:52am, the show usually broadcasts a ‘thought for the day’ - an implicitly religious reflection offered by some vicar or elder.

Last Thursday the Thought For The Day was delayed: the Archbishop of Canterbury would be in studio later that morning, so he would offer the thought then. (Already this was stark: the situation was so grave that the head of the Church of England was needed to offer pastoral advice in person.) Instead, the BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg was invited to offer some reflections on the moving tectonic plates of European and global politics.

Kuenssberg is sometimes prone to understated hyperbole, but last Thursday she offered a stark and sobering assessment. Back in the days of the Soviet Union, she said, the West may have had extreme ideological differences, but at least saw the Soviet Union as a stable actor on the world stage. When they reached a deal they stuck with it; everything was done by its book; and even if its ideology was completely at odds with the West, when they said something, they meant it.

But now, Kuenssberg assessed, Western leaders had to park their perceptions of Vladimir Putin as a Soviet-minded president of Russia. Instead they had to now consider him an irrational actor: offering bogus explanations to justify the invasion of another country, completely at odds with international intelligence, or even his own government account’s of events. The West was no longer dealing with a disagreeable statesman: it was dealing with a nuclear rogue. Pyongyang had its match in Moscow.

That was the analysis broadcast by the BBC last Thursday morning, in the slot usually reserved for a morning prayer.

It is easy to feel overwhelmed and bewildered by the sheer scale of what has changed in the last week. Part of what makes the Russian offensive in Ukraine so appalling is that there is no plausible justification for it. Before the invasion, the supposed fear was that Russia would be threatened by Ukraine joining NATO, and playing host to Western weapons - an argument undermined by Russia already sharing a land border with five NATO members anyway. None of them may have the emotional resonance of Ukraine, mind, but all of them are sovereign and capable of being used as a western military base.

Then when he launched his invasion, Putin said the exercise was necessary to stop a Nazi-like Ukrainian government from perpetrating “genocide” against Russian speaking people in the country‘s easternmost regions. This is a claim so preposterous and far-fetched that it defies any worthwhile analysis. (There is some genuine marginalisation of Russian-language media, but genocide?!)

The rest of the world therefore has no true understanding of what his end goal is. Is it the fear that a successful, thriving Ukraine would demonstrate to Russian people that a more promising future lies to the west than the east? Is Moscow simply paranoid about the mere presence of a rival military force nearby, in a country formerly of like mind? Is Russia simply now governed by an increasingly isolated, ageing, detached madman who will throw his military toys out of the pram if his sphere of influence wanes even a little?

Last Thursday it seemed hyperbolic for Ursula von der Leyen to speculate that Russia’s ambition would not end with Ukraine – that it could be a case of Ukraine now, European Union next. But maybe she’s not wrong. Neutral Finland is now having a national discussion about joining NATO out of sheer obligation, given the volatility of its eastern neighbour. But even the public debate on this has led to immediate threat from Moscow of intervention (read: invasion) if Finland recants its neutrality. So if an independent country cannot choose its own future because of the paranoia of its neighbour, how are the rest of us supposed to feel?

Will Putin throw good money after bad, and good bodies after dead, in an increasingly futile attempt to dismantle the postwar western order? Will he adopt the view of the classic despot and ignore global condemnation, as long as his domestic audience is sated - or at the very least kept in the dark about the true nature of his regime’s actions?

And what happens the next time that the Russian Navy informs us it’s undertaking military exercises off the coast of a country that doesn’t have sufficient manpower to operate its own naval fleet?

The European Union is, as its very core, a peace project: it is the modern evolution of a coal and steel union which was specifically designed to stop European countries from accruing the resources of war. Now, because of threats on its own doorstep, it is actively funding the military defence of a non-member.

So usurped is the old world, Ukraine’s president yesterday signed a letter seeking EU admission in a dimly-lit underground room while wearing military fatigues.

We are all in a new world now. Let us simply hope we are safe in it.