I’m trying to get some perspective on what’s happening in Ukraine. Why are we where we are now? If I was Ukrainian (and younger), would I be picking up a gun from wherever I could find one and learning how to use it? Would I be fighting?

For context, I’m thinking back twelve years to when I began this blog. Russia and China were asserting themselves, one chafing militarily, the other increasingly dominating our Western markets. But we still thought in the West that the world was moving in the right direction. Our direction. The financial crisis didn’t seem to have geopolitical implications.

All is so different now. The crisis took centre stage, Chinese imports, abundant and cheap, fooled us into thinking that we could keep spending as before. China upped its military spending. We had Brexit and Trump, both inward- and backward-looking exercises. We protested over the Uighers. We watched Hong Kong’s special status erode. America obsessed internally. In the UK we absurdly tried to break treaty obligations with the EU over Northern Ireland – what chance of our carrying any weight on the international stage? Biden, who I admire for his integrity, is a weak president. Johnson has mired us in scandals petty in scale but serious in their import – a government bereft of a moral sense and obsessed with its survival.

And what has been happening all the while? Belarus was the warning. But, to be fair, we couldn’t imagine an invasion, a brutal tanked-up invasion, coming. Not at least until last October, when American intelligence first reported on a troop build-up on the Ukrainian border. Even then, would Putin be so stupid, so careless of Russia’s status in the world?

We’d missed how paranoid he’d become, now expanded into veiled nuclear threats.  We’d kidded ourselves there was still internal opposition which might hold him back. But the siloviki, a new word for me, his security set-up, have a firm hold on the media, ever more on the internet, and a national guard which knows where its loyalties lie – so street protest is a dangerous game, a path to being beaten up, prison, maybe torture. The Russian elite overseas no longer has influence. They must play along.

That paranoia, about NATO expansion … I can, to a point, connect to it. Yes, NATO had pushed out its frontiers, taking in the old Warsaw Pact countries. Ukraine is, as Russia sees it, next. Promises were made that NATO wouldn’t push its boundaries eastward when the Soviet Union broke up. Not treaty promises, but an understanding that allayed Russian anxieties. Many in Russia rejoiced in democratic freedoms but to lose an empire, and so much status in the world, and so abruptly …. even hardened democrats would want reassurance.

A sane and measured route out of that dilemma, balancing democracy and national pride, while at the same time giving up all pretensions to empire, would that have been possible?

Russia would have won for itself a new sphere of influence. Armaments, space travel, vast natural resources: Russia’s status as a leader on the world stage would have been guaranteed. Poland and the Baltic states would have been happy in time to look both ways. Russia would have been able to keep China at arms’ length.

But the sell-off of state assets was chaotic. A new elite which had benefitted from the privatisations of Russian industry indulged itself abroad, Abramovich and Chelsea being the example for us that’s closest to home. Could there have been another way? Who knows. With a different leader. But it too quickly became a kleptocracy.

Remember that some of us in England have yet to come to terms with our own loss of empire, and the superior status they imagined went with it. France has the likes of Marine Le Pen and the new guy, Eric Zemmour. America has Trump and MAGA.

Putin is MRGA. Doesn’t have the same ring. Make Russian great again. MSUGS. Recreate a version of Soviet Union, crony capitalist and oil dependent. But claw back the old boundaries – I can just about connect to this.

The Russian national myth dates back to the 10^th century, to Kiev, as the birthplace of modern Russia. I’ve always loved the Eisenstein movie, Alexander Nevsky. Nevsky was the prince of Kiev, a 13th century hero, defeating the Teutonic Knights in the Battle on the Ice. Prokofiev’s music captures the mood. Yes, for a proud Russian, Kiev (Kyiv, in Ukrainian) must have a special place… But it’s now another country. It has a identity separate from Russia built up over eight centuries.

Eight centuries of invasion and counter-invasion. The Ukrainian language is one marker of identity. But wide sections of the population have Russian as their first language. Ukrainian president Vlodimir Zelensky is showing great courage facing up to Putin – and he is a native Russian speaker. Also, he’s Jewish, which makes Putin’s avowed de-nazification of the Ukraine a very sick joke indeed.

The issue of course is that the east of the country instinctively looks over the border to Russia. Democratic elections prompted by Russian had divided the country rather than brought it together.

It is that split identity that is the pretext for Putin’s invasion. Ukraine is of course a democracy, but back in 2014 the pro-Russian section of the population in the east of the country lost out when Yanukovich fled.

On the other side, over the western border, we’ve had NATO – expansionist but at the same time complacent. Assuming they had European security sewn up. They didn’t pick up on how deep-rooted Russian nationalism was and is to many Russians, and not just Putin, and how Putin and a tame media were exploiting something almost visceral.

We’ve also practised a good line in arrogance. British and American media have for a long time felt they could tell Russia what to do. That somehow our pressure would mean they’d change tack. That Navalny would be released. We didn’t pick up on how the Putin-dictated Russian mood had changed. One over-riding lesson might be – always engage with the other side’s point of view. They have as many contradictions as we do ourselves. Never assume you, the outsider, understand them better than they do themselves. We may as liberal democracies think we have right on our side. But ‘right’ in terms of world history is a highly relative term.

Remember the post-Berlin Wall optimism of the nineties.That was before Putin brought his old KGB attitudes and suspicions and disregard of human life into play. How much is it one man – working with old contacts, and old disenfranchised security elites which had found themselves discarded, and now had a way back in – who has taken Russia down this tragic path?

How will this play out? Will Putin impose his will on Ukraine, at great cost to his country and its economic and moral well-being. Will he negotiate a new status quo with Russia in control of wide areas of the Ukraine? The West, he could say, has been taught a lesson. Or will the siloviki come to realise they’re backing the wrong horse? But their loyalties will be difficult to turn. Likewise the Russian media has been tamed into replaying this myth of a genocidal Ukraine. How many Russians really believe it? But dare anyone in the state-controlled media step out of line?

What’s happening in Ukraine will change the world in ways we can’t yet comprehend. Peace treaties, maybe. Vast reputational and economic damage. Maybe a re-assertion of democracy – even liberal democracy – in the West. We’ve been too complacent, and tied up in ‘death of democracy talk. Too self-absorbed. Germany is radically increasing its defence budget, and is now supplying Ukraine with arms – did Putin foresee this? Rogue states as we’ve recently seen them, Turkey (now blocking the Bosphorus to Russian vessels) and Hungary (remembering 1956), are now supporting Ukraine. (Why did India abstain on the Security Council vote condemning Russia?) China and Taiwan: what lessons will China take from all this? Will the USA now re-balance its foreign policy – equal status for Europe and the Far East? Economic implications – shorter supply lines, energy sources closer to home, more political savvy, less talk of ‘rational’ markets when there are so many other forces in play.

Never in my lifetime has the world been in such a state of flux, with so much uncertainty.

I’ve explored the local countryside this year as never before. Not only discovered plants and flowers I never knew existed, but also put names to flowers, and corrected the names I’d got wrong. I’ve also noted how plants come into flower in our local Cotswold area at the same time – it seems on the same day. There is a deep pattern to this floral madness!

The presenters of the BBC’s Springwatch series have found the same. Locked down they’ve taken the opportunity to explore their immediate localities, again as never before. The series has now come to an end, after three weeks. I came to it late this year, but the programmes I’ve seen have been a delight. Badgers in Cornwall, storks in Sussex, goshawks in Montgomeryshire – with a focus on nests and fledglings. It’s easy to be sentimental about small birds, but the spectacle of goshawks feeding fledglings and squabs to their young goes without comment. Which is as it should be.

Dung beetles were a highlight. They are coprophages – dung-eaters. What impressed me is the way they are adapted, with hard shells and burrowing capabilities, and sensory apparatus to pick up smells, to their task. The result of evolution over hundreds of millions of years. It is the precision of their adaptation that struck home. Evolution tends to perfection.

The beavers damming a small stream in a copse on a Cornish farm were another highlight. The way they both hold back the flow of water, to create ponds, and release it, to avoid it swamping their lodges. With benefits to the local ecology downstream.

What also struck me was the aerial view of the ponds. Such a small areas, so vast the fields around. The farmer, naturalist and author, John Lewis-Stempel, raised eyebrows several years ago for criticising Springwatch. It can convey a false reality – the areas in which wildlife survives or, better, prospers, are vanishingly small.

The government’s Agriculture bill has passed its first reading in parliament. The big controversy has been around the government’s voting down a widely-supported amendment that would have guaranteed that imports meet the UK’s current high standards of environment, animal welfare and food safety. The argument being that all restrictions on free trade are by definition bad. It is a sad example of free-market dogma overriding common sense.

It doesn’t give me any confidence that the Agriculture Bill will come to grips with the big issues facing the countryside. It phases out the direct payments to farmers that lie at the heart of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, and replaces them with a system that rewards farmers for the provision of ‘public goods’, which include ‘better quality air and water, improved soil health, public access to the countryside, animal welfare, and flood-risk reduction’.

The focus on Covid 19 has meant that the bill has had little press coverage, and the bill’s ability seriously to address conservation – and restoration – has hardly been discussed.

Can we have any confidence that issues of conservation, and indeed of ownership, will be seriously addressed? Lewis-Stempel highlights how disastrous pesticides and herbicides and the practice of ploughing fields to their margins have been for wildlife and wild flowers. ‘I have had a gutful of chemical farming.’

Springwatch, I appreciate, cannot be political. The BBC’s Countryfile also skates round political issues. Farming is usually conveyed in a positive light. They are both, Springwatch especially, fine programmes. But we cannot allow ourselves to be shielded from realities. As with climate issues we need to break out from within our comfort-zone carapace, and pick up a few cudgels.

The way ahead for the countryside is, and will not be, an easy one.

The world this morning is white. Or black. The inbetween where wisdom lies is in danger of being squeezed.

Tory MPs are on their knees attempting to wipe graffiti of the Churchill statue in Parliament Square. Priti Patel goes ultra vires telling Bristol police they must prosecute demonstrators who tore down the Colston statue. Melanie Phillips in The Times asserts that ‘On both sides of the Atlantic, this mayhem is the result of decades of appeasing those determined to bring down Western culture.’

(Am I, I wonder, one of those seeking to bring down Western culture, or one of the appeasers? I think I’ll reverse the charge in this case. This mayhem has more to do with people like Ms Phillips who choose white over black, or for that matter black over white.)

On the other hand, I’m hardly in favour of lining up dustcarts or convenient quaysides as dumping grounds for every statue which offends. Colston had to go. He just went sooner. But Cecil Rhodes?

Nelson Mandela, with his ‘Cecil, you and I are going to have to work together now’ line, suggested a way forward. Statues may once have been celebrations of individuals. Now they help us connect with how we’ve got to where we are, and how brutal that process often was. Colston was simply in too public a place, and his slave-trading simply too egregious a crime.

(Chris Patten, Chancellor of Oxford University, quoted Mandela this morning on the Today programme. It is a very apposite quote, but Patten came over as too complacent. We aren’t where we were four years ago, or indeed where we were in 2003.)

I’ve a personal interest in Rhodes. Oriel, where his statue stands, all but invisible, high above the High Street, is my college. It’s almost as if, more than a hundred years ago, even then they didn’t want to shout about Rhodes. Most of us never knew he was there. (We frequented a hot dog stand on the other side of the road, but never thought to look up.) Oriel decided four years ago that the statue should stay. Now they are in a bind. Most statues are more or less public property. Councils can decide. The Rhodes statue is Oriel’s and the college risks being drawn into a very public and very animated debate.

We know where the Daily Telegraph will stand, and donors to Oxford college finances may well, many of them, be Telegraph readers. If the college decides to remove the statue donors may look elsewhere. That’s the impression that’s given. Whether true or not, I can’t say.

But what matters more is the wider debate. The Black Lives Matter debate, about inclusion and job opportunities and education. In the USA it’s focused around the police. Our police function as guardians, not enforcers, and while there are policing issues, it’s important to keep the focus on the wider issues of inclusion. I want to see action which is radical and conclusive, so we don’t have to keep returning to the issue of discrimination. Likewise I want to see NHS and healthcare workers, and all support staff, properly recognised, and remunerated. That included immigrant populations. Minimum salaries shouldn’t guide immigration policies. The contribution immigrants make to society, and it is huge, is a far far better guide.

I’m an historian by training, and history isn’t about identifying with your favourite bits of the past. (Though history is a marvellous diversion.) Or the more nefarious bits. We shouldn’t get hung up on Cecil. If it’s anything, history is about recognising the interplay between continuity and change, and how they work out in the present. So don’t get stuck in an antiquated timeframe. Be aware that values change, and in our time they have changed radically for the better. Western culture, and that includes much though not all of religion as practised in the West, now has a much wider and more inclusive moral basis. Pope Francis is a good exemplar.

We’re in danger in the current debate of getting stuck behind our statues. Letting them dictate its terms. We’d do far better to seek out the ground we hold in common, and work out from there.

Have we gone too far for that? I’d like to see most – not all, but most – statues remain. Let them help us connect with our history. Whether that should include Cecil Rhodes or not, the next few days will tell.

I don’t want to see a much important debate highjacked by the fate of statues. Nor do I want see my college becoming the subject of public opprobrium. If in the end the statue has to go, then so be it.