By Michael Every of Rabobank
War and Peace
As Tolstoy said of ‘War and Peace’, it’s "not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle." I agree: it’s a schlep. It’s one of those epic novels that you look at and think - can I? And I must confess, with my eyesight, I can’t. Of course, that doesn’t mean one isn’t aware of what the book covers, the Napoleonic war between France and Russia, or its key question - is history driven by powerful underlying forces, or powerful leaders?
That question, Russia, and war and peace, are all going to be key today. Russian President Putin is due to speak to his Federal Assembly against the backdrop of the largest military mobilization since the Cold War, and perhaps in the region since World War Two. This has already seen the closure of the Kursk Strait, and it now includes shutting down the airspace around the region until April 24. Nobody knows what Putin will say, and it could all just be rhetoric, with the army in the background to warn the West not to try to expand NATO eastwards. Yet there are also suggestions Putin may announce the annexation of the Donbas region of Ukraine, within which 650,000 have claimed Russian passports in recent years.
The first question is what the Western response would be to a unilateral redrawing of national borders: and the answer is very little short of rhetoric and sanctions; and any real sanctions would hurt Western economies a lot – particularly on the cost-push inflation side. The second question is if we would see a (Western-backed?) Ukrainian...