So the puppet master in the Kremlin has declined the invitation to meet with his Ukrainian counterpart. How very Roman of him. One is reminded of the late imperial habit of refusing audience to barbarian chieftains, a gesture of contempt that masks a deeper paralysis. The refusal is not a sign of strength, but of a regime that has run out of ideas, reduced to the thuggish inertia of a dying order.
Let us be clear. This is not diplomacy. This is theatre. Putin, the great historian of grievance, has decided that the war is no longer about negotiations. It is about something far more primitive: the assertion of a will that cannot be questioned, because to question it would be to admit that the whole enterprise was a catastrophic miscalculation. The new phase, as the Kremlin calls it, is merely the old phase grown more desperate. We have seen this before. In the final years of the Soviet Union, the leadership withdrew into a fortress mentality, convincing themselves that the West was collapsing even as their own edifice crumbled. Today, we witness the same delusion, but with nukes.
It is fashionable in certain circles to decry Western decadence. And yes, we are decadent. But decadence at least allows for the possibility of critique. The Russian state has moved beyond decadence into a kind of nihilistic fervour. They no longer fight for an idea, but against one. Their only unifying principle is resentment. And resentment, as the Victorians knew, is a poor foundation for empire. Ask the Ottomans. Ask the Habsburgs. The refusal to meet Zelensky is not a strategic masterstroke; it is a confession. The Kremlin cannot offer a vision of the future, only a scorched-earth defence of the past.
Of course, the liberal commentariat will wring their hands and call for more talks, more concessions. But what is there to negotiate with a regime that has made a fetish of intransigence? The West must understand that this war will not end at a negotiating table. It will end when one side exhausts the other, or when the Russian elite decides that the cost of their leader’s vanity is too high. Until then, we are spectators to a slow-motion tragedy, a replay of the Thirty Years’ War with better surveillance drones. We can only hope that our own leaders do not mistake stubbornness for strength, and that they remember the lesson of history: empires that refuse to adapt are inevitably consumed by their own contradictions.
