Thursday was supposed to be Freedom Day, the start of a bright new post-Covid era. It heralded instead a far darker dawn, the beginning of a new conflict, which not only threatens the innocent citizens of the Ukraine — but also poses a deadly threat to us all.
There is a grim inevitability to the images on our TV screens and front pages, to the panic circulating on social media. Everyone I know is consumed by an overwhelming sense of fear and trepidation, a sense of real foreboding.
Perhaps if we hadn’t just endured two years of Covid, there might be more room for optimism. But we are all, in our own ways, shattered, our reserves of energy and resilience depleted. Yesterday morning, when I met a friend for breakfast after school drop off, neither of us knew what to say, how to process the news.
Instead of our usual animated discussion, we just stared blankly at our rapidly congealing eggs, sighing intermittently. Later, I called another friend who works for the civil service. She sounded exhausted, on the verge of tears. ‘First Brexit, then Covid, now this,’ she said. ‘Will it ever end?’
Part of the problem is that Putin has always seemed so implausible, like a character out of a Cold War movie, a James Bond villain full of empty boasts. We thought people like him had been banished for ever, relics of a bygone age
Over the years we got used to seeing bad guys like Putin portrayed less as bogeymen and more like buffoons, parodied on stage and screen, depicted as knuckle-heads, turned into the butt of jokes… except nobody is laughing now
My 17-year-old son came home from school, his face serious. Did I think he would be conscripted? I laughed — of course not, I said. ‘But seriously, Mum, that’s what everyone’s saying.’
I spoke to a colleague and she said her daughter had asked the same question. Another had been in tears. Poor kids: locked in their rooms for two years, now terrified at the prospect of World War III.
Of course, all this is nothing as to what the people of Ukraine are going through. I can’t conceive of what it must have felt like to wake in the middle of the night in Kyiv to the sound of sirens and the national anthem, as Putin’s troops rolled into action.
To be facing obliteration, the end of civilised life, a future where the only certainty is pain and loss. I imagine it must be like standing on a beach as a tsunami sucks the sea from the shore, knowing the wave is coming, knowing there is no way you can possibly outrun it.
More from Sarah Vine for the Daily Mail…
Anger, fear, frustration, the injustice of it all. And yet, it’s not like we weren’t warned. It’s not like we couldn’t have seen it coming. For years, Putin’s Russia has been growing, spreading, multiplying like a deadly cancer. Endless warnings, endless red flags, from the Skripal poisonings to the Russian bot factories.
And yet, like someone who ignores a suspicious lump because they simply can’t face the awful truth, we have turned a collective blind eye to the increasingly glaring symptoms of this man’s diseased mind. It’s almost as though we hoped the whole thing might go away on its own. Unfortunately, that’s not how cancers — or despots, for that matter — work.
Part of the problem is that Putin has always seemed so implausible, like a character out of a Cold War movie, a James Bond villain full of empty boasts. We thought people like him had been banished for ever, relics of a bygone age.
It felt almost absurd to believe him, to view him as a serious threat, not least because his behaviour — the endless pictures of him riding bare-chested through forests, the memes of him fighting bears, rumours about him owning tigers — and old-school rhetoric felt like something out of a Hollywood satire. Where once the West used to take men like Putin deadly seriously, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union slowly changed perceptions.
Over the years we got used to seeing bad guys like Putin portrayed less as bogeymen and more like buffoons, parodied on stage and screen, depicted as knuckle-heads, turned into the butt of jokes.
Except no one’s laughing now, are they? And we in the West appear guilty not only of arrogance but also an almost criminal complacency. It’s as though, having banished one swivel-eyed despot all those years ago, we somehow thought we would never have to do it again. But evil is like knotweed. It doesn’t matter how much you hack it back, no matter how painstakingly you dig it out, torch it, poison it, raze it, it burrows those rhizomes deep down into the darkness where it lies dormant before finding its way back out. You have to be ever vigilant, for it never truly goes away.
What we are witnessing here is a re-emergence of the evil that tore through Europe in the 20th century, costing millions of innocent lives. It’s clear that Putin’s ambitions don’t stop at the border, and that his ultimate aim is the destabilisation of democracy across the globe.
And where once I would have wholeheartedly agreed with Defence Secretary Ben Wallace when he said we ‘kicked the backside’ of Russia during the reign of Tsar Nicholas I, and that we could ‘always do it again’ now, I’m afraid, I’m just not sure.
Britain is not the powerhouse it once was. Not only do we find ourselves in a much weaker position politically, socially and economically; we are also psychologically and, I fear, morally less equipped to rise to the challenge.
Is it really any wonder Putin thinks he can do whatever he wants? He looks at the West — not just the UK, but once mighty America — and sees democracy weakened by petty infighting and trivial rivalries, scoffs at our obsession with human rights, our self-flagellation over climate change, the endless march of the woke brigade.
He saw what happened in Afghanistan, how we abandoned the Afghan people to the Taliban for the sake of political appeasement back home. He has witnessed the mollification of our once great institutions — from the BBC to the Armed Forces. There is a weakness in us that cannot be denied.
So here we are, arguing about unisex toilets while teenage conscripts my son’s age are dying for the sake of an old man’s mad ego.
Putin may be mad, but he is no fool. He has played a long game, and chosen his moment well. While we’ve been fighting a pointless culture war, he’s been preparing for the real thing. And now we must all dance to his deadly tune.
