The assassination of a Putin critic on Polish soil is a grim reminder that the Kremlin’s reach exceeds its grasp only in the West’s fevered imagination. British intelligence, ever the vigilant watchdogs of a decadent era, now tracks the killer’s digital footprints back to Moscow, while the Kremlin shrugs with practiced innocence. This is not a new game; it is the oldest trick in the autocrat’s playbook, a revival of the KGB’s operatic murders that once spiced up Cold War diplomacy.
We have become spectators to a tragedy of our own making. Every denial from the Kremlin is a scripted performance, every silence from Brussels a surrender. The victim was a voice, inconvenient and loud.
The method was careful, clinical, and utterly predictable. We pretend surprise, but we have seen this before: the poisoned tea, the polonium, the defenestration. Poland, a nation that knows a thing or two about Russian aggression, now becomes a stage for the shadow war.
The West’s response, a collective shrug and a statement of deep concern, is the intellectual decadence of an empire that has lost its nerve. We should be drawing parallels to the Ribbentrop-Molotov line, not to some abstract notion of post-modern conflict. This is a murder, plain and simple, and the culprit is a regime that sees no contradiction between attending G20 summits and ordering hits on its enemies.
The moral of this story? There is none. We are too busy apologising for our civilisation to defend it.
The only question that remains is how many more ghosts will haunt Europe before we realise that the Cold War never ended; it just changed its wardrobe.
