This morning Russia invaded Ukraine. Is this the start of something new? In the past years of growing fragility and certainties shaken, it has felt as though we are ratchetting up to catastrophic breakdown. It this it? Or is it a story and actually history just keeps going and there is no cataclysmic moment?
Two speeches have stood out in the last few days. One was the Kenyan ambassador to the United Nations, urging Russia not to invade. He spoke of how African countries have inherited borders drawn by others, dividing ethnic groups, religious groups etc and have more or less decided to accept these boundaries and make the best of them as the alternative is never-ending war.
The other speech was this morning, by the Ukrainian president, in Russian, to the people of Russia, telling them that Ukraine is its own country, talking about streets and squares in the cities to the east and saying that he had a personal relationship with them in a way that Russians did not because Russia was another country.
Both speeches were passionate, powerful and serious. They were intelligent, with none of the bluster we’ve seen from Putin, from Biden, from the clowns in the UK. I was made a little uncomfortable by what Kimani said, about accepting the historical legacies of colonialism, but it made me think about my lifelong unquestioned assumption that colonial borders are bad because of how they cut up communities. So it made a point that made me think and I can respect it.
This morning I also listened to a podcast about the occupation of Istanbul by British troops after World War I, and was interested to hear that one of their chief criticisms of the Ottoman Empire was its diversity. How ideas change.