Member

At the Munich Security Conference, I underlined that Ukraine must be at the heart of any talks about Ukraine’s future, and I said that the West must learn from our history. Vladimir Putin and his war are no historical aberration. He draws on a tsarist tradition—the imperialism and authoritarianism of Peter the Great or Nicholas I—and a Soviet tradition; he is, after all, a KGB agent who operates by deception. It was an American diplomat, George Kennan, whose ‘Long Telegram’ in 1946 warned of a deep continuity in Kremlin thinking. He argued that the Kremlin would respond only to strength. That was the basis for the policy of containment, as part of which Britain contributed tens of thousands of troops to the British Army of the Rhine. It was that strength, not paper promises, that deterred Moscow from further advances west.