Irish Examiner view: A pivotal moment in history

The Ukraine war has entered its third year

Sat, 24 Feb, 2024 - 01:00

The Ukraine war entered its third year this week. Or tenth year, if you set the start date with the annexation of Crimea.

The anniversary was hallmarked by the murder of one of the few remaining voices of internal opposition to Vladimir Putin.

The death of Alexei Navalny, caused by the nerve agent novichok, according to his formidable widow, Yulia Navalnaya, is the latest in a long list of killings and fatalities that have followed the Russian president since 2000: Sergei Yushenkov, Alexander Litvinenko, Boris Berezovsky, the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, and now Navalny.

By a perverse coincidence, Navalny’s death took place almost 50 years to the day that the best-known Soviet dissident, the Nobel Prize-winning writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, was exiled after he survived an assassination attempt by a chemical agent.

His mighty work, The Gulag Archipelago, exposed the hardship and repression of the Soviet labour camps, which he had experienced, and outraged the Kremlin.

An editorial in the party newspaper, Pravda, in a foretaste of contemporary allegations against both Navalny and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said that Solzhenitsyn, a decorated Red Army veteran, supported “Hitlerites” and Nazi collaborators.

He was expelled from his country, but returned in 1994.

Uncomfortably, many of his later utterances — on religion, on Russian and Slavic patriotism, on the moral and spiritual decay of the West — chime with Putin’s commentary.

Irish political leaders and street campaigners focus on the horrors in Gaza.

But it is the war in Ukraine that poses the greatest threat to the stability of Europe.

With the manifest failure of sanctions and the Russian victory at Avdiivka, the first success for the Kremlin since last May, a row has reignited over sub-optimal support from the democracies.

Resources are too few and too late to turn the tide of battle.

Mr Zelenskyy blamed a shortage of ammunition on the defeat in the eastern Donbas.

F16 fighters, which might have been used to counter Russian air superiority, will not arrive until midsummer.

A €65bn US aid package has been delayed while the House of Representatives goes on holiday.

Donald Trump, like the hurler on the ditch, undermines Nato and EU unity.

His former Russia adviser, English-born Fiona Hill, warns that Trump believes that Europe “rips off” the US.

While it competes economically, it sets low-ball defence budgets.

It is easy to see how this can be misrepresented in populist terms and to concede, also, that Putin has had his most encouraging weeks since he started this phase of his war, 24 months ago.

The question is whether Europe is safe, and what the EU will do if Putin regains sufficient confidence to probe again, perhaps in Moldova.

Or, even more dangerously, the Balkans.

This summer will mark the 75th anniversary of the founding of Nato.

The conflict in Middle and Eastern Europe is precisely the type of challenge the organisation was created to contain.

It requires an unambiguous vision of how this war must end. And an acceptance by all of us that there has been too much hand-wringing and not enough responsibility.

Ireland is a rich nation and must contribute more to collective security. We are at a pivotal moment in our history.

Service without a smile

The Irish burger restaurant that provides a “unique, interactive dining experience” by insulting its customers is never going to be short of material.

Never mind the racist, sexist, homophobic, or ableist slurs that are on the banned list, there are plenty of conventional ways to be rude to patrons.

Top of the list might be the faux, passive-aggressive sincerity when businesses are about to tell you something disappointing: ‘Unfortunately, our toilets are out of order’; ‘Unfortunately, the network is down’; ‘Unfortunately, my colleague who deals with that is not in today.’

That word ‘unfortunately’ suggests that the problem is a matter of random chance rather than a symptom of incompetence, or poor planning.

Then there’s the ‘we’re very busy’ shtick: ‘Our lines are experiencing extremely high demand. We will switch you to the next available operative. You are currently — pause while the algorithm checks — number 31 in the queue. Please be assured your call is important to us.”

Or the rebuff to a question about your own business: ‘I am sorry but the Data Protection Act/money-laundering rules/ESG protocols prevent us from providing that information.’

If all else fails to diminish the person footing the bill, there is the final kick in the teeth: “We only accept payment by card.”

Some 80% of organisations believe they provide a superior customer experience, only 8% of customers agree.

The question is not whether the use of AI can improve service interactions, but whether it could possibly make them worse.

The English heiress turned IRA terrorist

The new film Baltimore, about an English heiress turned IRA terrorist, arrives with perfect timing.

Not only is Sinn Féin, the party in which Bridget Rose Dugdale has been active for very many years, at the high point of public support, but we are at the 50th anniversary of a number of Dugdale’s exploits.

Whether the contemporary history of the IRA is accurately reflected in the film, from the Irish writing-and-directing duo Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, will be judged as Baltimore moves out of the festival circuit — it was in Dublin this weekend — to general release next month.

There’s no shortage of source material.

Dugdale, portrayed by Imogen Poots, until recently one half of a star romantic duo with James Norton, was a privileged, Oxford-educated, blue-stocking daughter of a millionaire underwriter who turned to Marxism.

After attempting to steal hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of silverware and paintings from her parents’ estate, she came to the North, where she took up with an IRA active service unit.

In January 1974, she was involved in the hijacking of a helicopter that was used to drop milk-churn bombs on the Royal Ulster Constabulary station in Strabane.

In April of that year, Dugdale took part in a raid with three other IRA members on Russborough House in Co Wicklow.

They stole 19 Old Masters by Gainsborough, Rubens, Goya, and Vermeer.

That was the second Vermeer lifted that winter.

‘The Guitar Player’ was taken off the wall at Kenwood House, a stately home at the edge of Hampstead Heath, on February 23.

It was found three months later leaning against a gravestone in a London churchyard.

The thief has never been identified.

IRA members sent a ransom note offering to exchange the Russborough House haul for IR£500,000 — €6.5m at current prices — and the release of bombers Dolours and Marian Price.

In May, gardaí raided a house rented by Dugdale in Glandore and recovered the paintings.

She was sentenced to nine years.

She was, she told the court: “Proudly and incorruptibly guilty.”

She gave birth to a son, Ruairí, in Limerick Prison.

The father, Eddie Gallagher, a fellow IRA member, kidnapped the Dutch industrialist Tiede Herrema and held him hostage in Monasterevin, Co Kildare, against the release of Dugdale and the Price sisters.