To understand how Putin relates to the West, one must remember that the West meant two very different things in the Soviet Union, which at first sight seem incompatible.
Through modern history, political cartoonists and caricaturists have been threatened, censored, jailed, and even murdered because of their often underappreciated but unusually potent art.
Even were a mountain of cold hard cash at hand, today’s Ukraine would never make it, without middle ground being found among the country’s main superpower patrons. And quickly.
