Working at senior levels in major organisations exposes you to decision makers with different personalities, motives, and different ways of interpreting a situation. You tend to calibrate decision makers, and hone instincts that alert you to circumstances where their decisions take the organisation in a direction destined to fail. These instincts woke like never before while watching Mr Putin’s theatrics justifying the invasion of Ukraine. Mr Putin has put himself and his regime on the road to eventual demise, at least that’s what the Badger senses.
By invading Ukraine, Mr Putin has shaken democracies out of a comfortable complacency with Russia, galvanised democratic nations into unity of action, and forced the United Nations to question Russia’s membership of the Security Council. Mr Putin has ‘form’; he sent troops into Georgia and Crimea and his regime’s institutions are implicated in using a nerve agent against people in Salisbury in the UK and an opposition activist in Russia itself. The regular television pictures of him sitting at his long table distanced from others conveys an insecurity and the aura of an obsessed, irrational, barbaric, bully corrupted by power. A bully, however, can only be a bully if those being bullied allow themselves to be a victim. Standing up to a bully by not allowing them to have power over you is the best way to deal with any bully, and that’s just what the courageous people of Ukraine are doing. Western democracies are now doing this too and Mr Putin will be held responsible for his actions.
The fate of the Ukrainian people is in the balance, but their ‘fight to the end’ spirit reminds the Badger of his father’s stories from sheltering as a twelve-year old boy in London’s Underground during the Blitz in World War 2. He often said that ‘everyone believed they had right on their side, and everyone had a warrior spirit inside to fight if enemy troops arrived in London’. This inherent spirit is much in evidence in Ukraine today.
Today’s world is highly dependent on connected IT systems and computer devices, and nations across the globe have been ramping up their defensive and offensive cyber capabilities over the last decade to mitigate threats. However, although cyber incidents undoubtedly feature in this conflict, this war shows that conventional military forces with bombs and bullets are needed to take territory and supress a population. Although few people consider themselves to be any kind of warrior, the Ukrainians have shown not only that we have to fight for our freedoms, but also that in today’s world this means we must all now be warriors. The world today is different to that experienced by my father during the London Blitz. Mr Putin, however, has shown that while the world might be different, with people like himself in positions of enormous power, the world is no better than it was 80 years ago.
