The quotation from John Donne, metaphysical poets’ founder and dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, as apt today, with the world watching appalled as Vladimir Putin invades yet another former member of the USSR, as it was in the XVI century.
The West starts to unite
One of the abiding images of Russia’s attack on Ukraine will be smiling wives and mothers using kitchen graters
to grind fertilizer for Molotov cocktails to defend Kyiv.
The Economist reported that Mr Putin had launched what is sure to be Europe’s most intense war in a generation possibly its largest since the second world war. It will shake his regime to its foundations, debilitate Russia’s economy and fracture Russian society. It will shatter existing assumptions about European security. It could well send shock waves through the global economy. The speech with which an ill-looking Mr Putin announced the war’s first shots was blood-curdling. He put his aggression into the context of the West having “tried to finish us off, to destroy us completely after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The countries of NATO were “supporting Nazis and nationalists in Ukraine who will never forgive the people of Crimea their choice of joining with Russia.” No quarter could be given to them. And Russia “is one of the greatest nuclear powers in the world and has certain advantages in the newest weapons. Nobody should be in any doubt that any direct aggression against our country will lead to crushing and most horrible consequences for any potential aggressor.”
War in an inter-connected world
This time the war will not be fought by spilling the flower of Europe’s blood upon Ukrainian plains, for fear Putin will carry out his threat to nuke the West, but by little old ladies battling to pay to heat their homes and boil their kettles. Oil and gas prices jumped in response to the invasion; the Brent crude benchmark rose past $100 per barrel for the first time since 2014. Global stock markets fell. Moscow’s exchange was temporarily suspended and plunged on reopening. Civilian airliners were told to stay clear of Ukrainian airspace and more countries are denying Russian flights clearance.
Sanctions will harm the West too. Apart from the oil prices increases Russia is Europe’s main supplier of gas. It exports metals like nickel and palladium and along with Ukraine it exports wheat. All that will present problems at a time when the world economy is struggling with inflation and supply chain glitches. And yet, by the same measure, the fact that the West is prepared to suffer for sanctions sends Mr Putin the message that it cares about his transgressions.
Business prepares for a different future
Fraser Nelson writing in The Spectator yesterday said anyone with a Ukrainian passport ought to be allowed to stay here for a year or two at first, longer if needed. The last twenty years have shown just how well Britain can handle this we have the apparatus, the economic need and (through Putin’s war) the moral imperative.
- Create a forecast and select your integration
- Set the start date as your prior financial year.
- Connect to your company data.
- Set your record types
- Map the GL codes
- Import
- Extend to your new financial year.
- Enter your opening balances
- Import your actuals
* No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
MEDITATION XVII
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
John Donne