Professor Geoffrey Roberts is one of a growing number of ‘free thinkers’ who are rejecting the standard Western propaganda model that frames Putin and Russia as merchants of evil, instead ascribing to them motives that are both pragmatic and commonplace.  This leaves plenty of room to criticize Putin’s regime and its hardball geopolitics.  These academics, however, have shouldered the intellectual’s role to challenge the dominant narrative and expose underlying untruths – “Russia’s totally unprovoked war”, etc.

As any rookie strategist knows, outcome-focussed policy is based around the alignment of ends, ways and means: what you set as your goals must be matched with a clear strategy and the necessary resources to achieve them. Ukraine as a Western proxy war has proven a massive failure on all three counts.

Time will prove that an ugly peace delivers more than a beautiful war. Russia and the US are setting to work on something even bigger than the Ukraine conflict: normalising relations between the two superpowers which will have huge consequences economically, geopolitically and, hopefully, all to the benefit of the long-suffering Ukrainians and other peoples caught between the two behemoths.