The intelligence briefings land with the same dreary predictability as the autumn rains. UK intelligence warns of an imminent Russian offensive on a Donbas city. The city's name changes: Bakhmut, Avdiivka, now another.
The script remains the same. We are expected to gasp, to clutch our pearls. But any student of history sees this not as a crisis, but as a grim, grinding inevitability.
This is the Fall of Rome in slow motion: a decaying empire lashing out at shadows, exhausting its strength in pyrrhic battles against its own periphery. The Soviet Union's ghost is a needy poltergeist, demanding ever more blood to sustain its illusion of relevance. The West, meanwhile, plays the part of the late Roman Senate: decadent, distracted, debating the finer points of gender-neutral pronouns while the barbarians mass at the gates.
We have the intelligence, we have the warnings, but we lack the will. Why? Because our intellectual class has convinced itself that history is a fairy tale with a happy ending, that progress is linear, that the Donbas is a problem to be managed rather than a symptom of a deeper civilisational malaise.
The Ukrainian soldier in the trench understands this better than our pundits. He knows that this war is not about territory; it is about the survival of a national idea against a predatory neighbour who cannot let go of its imperial delusions. And we, the comfortable West, wring our hands and send just enough aid to prolong the agony without securing the victory.
It is a coward's strategy. The Victorians understood that the cost of empire was vigilance and force. We have abandoned both, preferring the sterile comfort of sanctions and statements.
The Donbas will burn. The question is whether we will learn anything from the ashes.
