Academy Of Ideas

This meeting was held live at the Royal National Hotel on the 14 March 2022: academyofideas.org.uk/event/ukraine-in-the-crosshairs-of-history A famous old Russian once said: ‘There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.’ The past week feels exactly like that since Russia’s appalling decision to invade Ukraine. Not only will there be enormous bloodshed, but a nation’s independence and sovereignty is under threat. It feels like an earthquake has taken place in international relations, with old certainties undermined and gathering trends suddenly coming to fruition. We need to ask how we got to this point, what we need to do now and what the wider ramifications are. How did we get here? In all the confusion, the ‘Vladimir Putin is a mad dictator’ explanation really isn’t a good enough answer. We need a much better historical perspective than we’ve been getting so far, at the very least on events since the fall of the Soviet Union, but also how the current world order is, i