St Petersburg’s International Economic Forum, once a glittering showcase of Russian ambition, has been reduced to a stage for farce. The event, intended to trumpet the Kremlin’s resilience against Western sanctions, has been instead overshadowed by the hum of drone attacks. How perfectly symbolic. The city of Peter the Great, built to defy the swamp and the Swedes, now cowers under the buzz of unmanned aerial vehicles. That the forum continues at all is a testament to the regime’s stubbornness, but the drone incursions reveal a deeper truth: Russia’s pretensions to great power status are increasingly hollow.
The British government, in a move of predictable obstinacy, has maintained its sanctions regime. The irony is rich. The same London that once welcomed Russian oligarchs with open arms now tightens the screws. Yet one wonders if this is policy or theatre. Sanctions have not crippled Russia; they have merely redirected its economic energies towards China and the Global South. The forum’s attendees, a motley crew of autocrats and desperadoes, are a testament to this new reality. But the drones are a reminder that even this ersatz normalcy is fragile.
The historical parallels are irresistible. One thinks of the late Roman Empire, where emperors held games in the Colosseum while barbarians massed at the gates. Or of the Victorian era, where the British Empire’s ‘splendid isolation’ was undermined by the Boer War’s embarrassments. Russia today is a nation trapped in a performance of strength, its leaders oscillating between bluster and panic. The drone attacks are not a strategic threat; they are a psychological one. They puncture the illusion of invulnerability that sustains the regime.
But let us not be naïve. The UK’s sanctions are a moral gesture, not a decisive blow. The real story is the intellectual decadence of the West, which cannot conceive of a world beyond the sanctions regime. While the drones buzz over St Petersburg, our leaders in London and Washington fiddle with export controls and asset freezes. They have no vision for a post-Putin Russia, no strategy to engage the Russian people. Instead, they rely on a tired playbook of economic warfare, which history shows rarely works as intended.
National identity is at stake here. For Russia, the forum is a ritual of belonging to the community of great powers. For Britain, sanctions are a ritual of moral superiority. Both are empty. The drones over St Petersburg are a harbinger of a world where rituals no longer hold. The question is whether we in the West have the courage to move beyond our own tired scripts or whether we, like the forum, will be exposed as hollow pretenders.
