The Ukraine war is proving that the world is an interconnected place, as events there are influencing the balance of power elsewhere, including the Far-East. Western sanctions against Russia have, for instance, brought Russia and China closer together. Now, Russia is spreading its influence in the Pacific region, striking a further blow to US interests.

It would appear that requiring foreign-funded organizations to register with the government is acceptable as long as it is Western states doing the requiring. But when the tables are turned, and it is Western-funded institutions that are being obliged to register, suddenly foreign agent laws turn out to be threats to democracy that are incompatible with fundamental values.

Russia’s new economic model may prove inefficient in the long term, creating a situation in which it is never able to catch up economically with the West. But in the short term, Russia looks more than able to withstand the pressures of the war in Ukraine. At the same time, Putin is here to stay. These are realities that policy makers in the West are going to have to face.

Even if Ukraine can somehow regain the initiative, it seems very doubtful that it could ever gain the degree of military superiority that it would need to achieve its stated political objective of restoring its 1991 borders. It would be unwise to say that that is impossible, but at present it’s very hard indeed to imagine how it could be done.

The cult of personality that the Soviet authorities built around Lenin after his death was fully justified. The revolution of November 1917 really was Lenin’s revolution, and the communist system really was Lenin’s creation. Great impersonal forces matter. But so too does individual agency. The life of Vladimir Lenin proves the point. For good or evil, he changed the path of history.

War has so many variables that attempting to predict its every twist and turn is somewhat foolish. At some point, the balance of power in any given conflict may shift so overwhelmingly in favour of one side or another that one can safely put one’s head above the parapet and predict the outcome. But in the case of Ukraine, we are far from reaching that point.

A full reckoning of what transpired during Euromaidan requires one to look at both internal and external factors, namely the divisions that existed within Ukrainian society, the peculiar ideology of Ukraine’s pro-European liberal intelligentsia, and the manner in which Ukraine became a battleground for competing geopolitical interests.

There are events that at the time seem to portend one thing but years later take on a very different hue. So it is with the dramatic political crisis that erupted in Russia 30 years ago this week, a crisis that ended with tanks of the Russian army blasting the country’s parliament, the Supreme Soviet, into submission.

There was very little to celebrate during this year’s Armenia Independence Day. Just one day earlier, authorities of the region of Nagorno-Karabakh capitulated to Azerbaijan following a brief offensive by the Azerbaijani military. The future of the region’s Armenian population remains uncertain and dreams of an Armenian Karabakh seem to be permanently shattered.

The Kremlin has no doubt learnt its lesson, and it is unlikely that it will ever again allow an individual to build a private army that can seriously threaten it. In this respect, while fitting a wider pattern, Yevgeny Prigozhin will probably prove to be a unique figure, destined to fascinate historians for centuries to come.