Meaning Bombs

I suppose us Europeans, perhaps more than anyone at this stage, understand why this war is different — one that cannot simply be ‘stopped’ or negotiated out of existence, one that we now all have to live with in a non-discretionary manner until all of its uncontainable consequences have manifested themselves. 

On our continent the conquest or attempted conquest of one state by another has tended to have geopolitical ramifications which extend for a very long time, centuries even. 

1066: The Norman Conquest of England might have appeared done and dusted in months, but the aftershocks persisted for at least 400 years until the conclusion of the Hundred Years War. And all that. 

From the outset this war in Ukraine has been in a dialogue with history, difficult history. Putin, one might say, has been trying to shout down, overrule history; mansplain at it. 

Europeans now understand that historical lines have been crossed. While the conflict as it stands is more plainly existential for Ukraine, the loom of approaching DARKNESS is being felt continent-wide (and the global economic repercussions unavoidable and, largely unpredictable). 

And so, while the West in the wider sense perceives a direct challenge to itself and the order that has prevailed, more or less, since 1945, for many Russians it is instead necessary to comprehend this as a civil war, with the near necessary fratricidal brutality that entails; its innocent victims mere traitors. 

We thus have two distinct, yet equally authentic ways for this to escalate further. 

Firstly, via the inclusion of additional national combatants and participants in the historical shouting match, yet also via an insane internecine conflict which back-contaminates large swathes of the former USSR. 

Think not that the army or the oligarchs might displace Putin, but that part of the army and some of the wealthy and powerful will try to act, and then remember all those nukes awaiting some sort of factional control. 

The missiles currently in the sky carry a payload of extra meaning. Perhaps Putin always wanted it to be this way, but after that first weekend when the immediate military and political goals were nixed, the need for this to be something more than Russia's private calamity became paramount. 

And for that reason he will surely continue to bomb hospitals, shoot his thermobarbaric weapons and unplug the nuclear reactor cooling systems, for he desperately needs a reaction from us, a retrospective meaning bomb that makes everyone understand why this is at once a global and civil catastrophe and not just his own private misadventure. Something he can duly present to history, in his shouty way, as defensive. 

And maybe he is almost certain to get it now — for as I say, this war is different, not just an ugly media spectacle where passive (albeit emotive) consumption or humanitarian angst are the only ways to interact with it, because it has an expansionary logic of its own. And we have already arrived at the days when the opportunity costs of mere observation have to be counted by the hour.