In the theatre of statecraft, the gesture is often as potent as the policy. Vladimir Putin’s decision to snub Volodymyr Zelensky, ignoring his very existence as a negotiating partner, is not mere petulance. It is a signal. It is a declaration that Moscow sees the Ukrainian president not as a peer but as a temporary inconvenience, a puppet whose strings will soon be cut. As Britain urges the West to hold the line, one must ask: how many more such slights will it take before we realise that this is not a diplomatic spat but a war of civilisations?
We are living through the autumn of the liberal international order. The comparison to the late Victorian era is instructive. Then, as now, a complacent hegemon faced a rising revisionist power. Then, as now, the hegemon’s leaders preached restraint and dialogue while the revisionist built arsenals and tested resolve. Lord Salisbury’s government, like our own, was fond of committees and conferences. But the Boers did not read the minutes, and the Germans did not attend the talks. Today, Putin does not care for British editorials or EU declarations.
Yet there is a deeper decadence at play. The Western intelligentsia has spent decades deconstructing the very idea of national sovereignty, of state interest, of patriotic duty. We have told ourselves that history is over, that great power politics is a relic. But Putin did not get that memo. He reads Clausewitz, not Fukuyama. He sees our multicultural prevarication as weakness, our economic interdependence as a vulnerability to be exploited. The snub of Zelensky is the snub of Europe itself: a continent that has forgotten how to think in terms of power, honour, and will.
To hold the line, as Britain urges, is not enough. A line is a passive thing. It can be crossed, overrun, or ignored. What we need is a redoubt: a fortress of the mind, a reassertion of our values without apology. The Victorians understood that empire required both the Bible and the bayonet. We have discarded both. We speak of human rights while our factories close and our birth rates plummet. We lecture others on democracy while our own institutions decay. The snub of Zelensky is a mirror of our own irrelevance.
Let us be clear: Putin’s contempt is not for Zelensky alone. It is for the entire project of European integration, of liberal democracy, of the rule of law. It is a bet that our societies lack the stomach for a long struggle. And looking at our endless debates over gas prices and student loans, I fear he may be right. The West must wake from its dogmatic slumber. It must remember that some things are worth fighting for, and that the man who sneers at your ambassador today will march on your borders tomorrow.
In the end, the question is not whether Putin will snub Zelensky again. It is whether we have the clarity to see this snub for what it is: a harbinger of a darker age. The line must hold. But first, we must remember why it was drawn.
