Who exactly is the enemy currently laying waste to Ukraine? There was a time the answer would have been easy. Those of us who grew up on this side of the iron curtain were schooled to see the old USSR as a dictatorship, an unyielding empire hell-bent on protecting its interests. There was no ambiguity in such an adversary.
But three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, supposedly a triumph for the west, the nature of Putin’s Russia is harder to determine. For all the free-market values ushered in since perestroika, this is a country – and a president – on which the old ideology still exerts a force. Those shaped by communism have reason to believe democracy did not bring them all they were promised.
