So Vladimir Putin has declined to play pat-a-cake with Volodymyr Zelensky, and the British government, in a fit of pique, demands a UN Security Council session. One must admire the sheer chutzpah of this gesture: the ritual invocation of a body that has about as much relevance to modern geopolitics as the Holy Roman Empire. The UN Security Council, that moribund theatre of the absurd, where Russia holds a veto and the West performs its moral outrage for the cameras. What exactly does Whitehall expect? A sternly worded resolution that Moscow will veto before the tea gets cold? Or perhaps they hope for a miracle: that the ghost of Gladstone will rise and shame the Kremlin into submission.
Let us strip away the diplomatic flummery. Putin’s refusal is not a diplomatic faux pas; it is a statement of power. He does not need to talk because he is winning. The West, by contrast, is reduced to frantic signalling: look at us, we are doing something! Never mind that the something is a re-enactment of the League of Nations’ finest hours. Britain, post-Brexit, post-GDP, post-relevance, clings to the vestiges of imperial grandeur by playing secretary to the American empire. But the Americans are tired. They have their own brewing catastrophe in the Middle East, and the European Union is paralysed by its own bureaucratic sclerosis.
What we are witnessing is the death rattle of the liberal international order. The rules-based system, that hallowed phrase repeated like a mantra by politicians who cannot articulate what the rules actually are, has collapsed. It never truly existed outside Western fantasy. Realpolitik has returned with a vengeance, and Britain is standing on the sideline waving a placard. The Victorians would be ashamed. They understood that power projection required navies and armies, not strongly worded complaints to a dysfunctional assembly.
Zelensky, for his part, is a tragic figure: a comedian trapped in a tragedy not of his making. He has done everything asked of him. He has pleaded, performed, and bled for Western approval. And what has he received? Leopard tanks in dribs and drabs, promises of F-16s that may arrive when the war is over, and now a UN Security Council meeting that will achieve precisely nothing. The Ukrainians are dying, and the West offers them a debating chamber.
The intellectual decadence here is staggering. We have convinced ourselves that institutions can substitute for will. That a UN resolution is a moral force. That diplomacy can solve what arms refuse to address. This is the mindset of a civilisation that has forgotten how to fight, so it has a meeting instead. The Romans would have smiled wryly and then sent the legions. But we have no legions. We have civil servants writing briefings for the UN mission.
Let us not pretend this is about Ukraine. This is about the West’s inability to confront its own decline. Britain, especially, cannot bear to admit it is no longer a great power. So it does what all declining empires do: it makes noises. Demands sessions. Issues statements. And pretends that history is a committee meeting.
Putin understands this. That is why he laughed. And the laughter echoes across the ruins of the post-Cold War settlement. The only question left is whether the West will wake up to its predicament or continue this farce until the curtain falls for good. I suspect the latter. Decadence, after all, is comfortable. It asks nothing of us except to watch and cluck our tongues.
