Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, and Russian President Vladimir Putin talk to each other during their meeting in Beijing, Feb. 4, 2022.
(Picture: AP)Vladimir Putin set out to restore a cross between the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire. In fact, his botched invasion of Ukraine has revived the West, sprung the EU and Britain into action and unsettled Xi Jinping in China. The only thing that now looks “brain dead”, which is how French president Emmanuel Macron infamously described Nato three years ago, is the Kremlin plan to seize Kyiv in days.
Geopolitics and war are always also about aura. In the run-up to Putin declaring a “special military operation” at 5.45am Moscow time two weeks ago, an aura of invincibility had gathered not only about Putin personally, dreaded as a master tactician, but about Russian military and intelligence assets, from the GRU to its elite hackers, after 15 years of military victory. This aura, in the mud around Kharkiv, the fiasco in Russian logistics and the ridiculousness of Moscow’s assumptions about Ukraine, has now been destroyed.
