It is a well-established certainty that war has a corrosive, sometimes a perniciously corrosive, impact on any form of democracy. I don’t privilege US and Western forms of democracy as being automatically better than other forms. Representative governance, direct and indirect, can take very many different forms and are the product, among other things, of culture, history, belief systems and social class dynamics.

Western intrigues are finally producing the desired effect, and social turmoil in Russia and even a coup is now a possible outcome—disastrous for the world, of course.

The general truism about war and democracy has proven to be the case in Ukraine, Russia, Europe and the USA. The US has been in a war against most of the world that it considers a threat to US supremacy, particularly since 2001, the 2002 Bush Doctrine of unilateralism, preemptive war and regime change, and the Neocon coup that both lay behind these events, and endorsed and exploited their aftermaths. Trump has further extended the battlefield to include most of his country’s quondam allies, in the name of preparing the US for war with China.

We are current observers to the corresponding US demolition of democratic due process, the ending of the separation of powers, the use of the military for the occupation of US cities, officially sanctioned assaults on US citizens and legal residents in the name of a war of deportation againast the undocumented, major violations against constitutionally protected free speech, support of Zionist genocide, the routinization of the murder of other countries’ citizens without evidence, legal justification and with impunity.

Imagining the US today, we can find much in the recently released movie, One Battle After the Other (excluding the silly scenes of warfare at the beginning of that movie), that is relatable as an allegorical condemnation of the fateful tail-dive of US institutions into a quagmire of militarism, racism and fascism.

In Ukraine, the US paid-for overthrow of democracy in 2014 when the country’s principal and ruling political party, the Party of the Regions, was criminalized by the new Banderite-empowered coup regime whose progeny has sustained the rule of the new oligarchy-autocracy, puppet to Western designs on the territory and wealth of the Russian Federation, with dire consequences for freedom of speech and human rights.

As for Europe, we see how the European Union and its members now accommodate to the cancellation of elections whose results it does not like, bans or in devious ways sideline political parties, even prevailing political parties (as in Germany or France) or manipulates their outcomes to produce something that the new masters of Europe feel they can live with. European media have completed their long journey of absorption into the information cages constructed for them by the oligarchs and their operatives in the political, intelligence and military domains.

The reading from the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) that you will also find in the Links that I will shortly release, is a further but important reminder that not all is well with the cause of democracy in Russia - very far from it. (WSWS is, however, a Trotskyist organisation, often strident in its condemnations of the Soviet Union and Russia.—Ed)

(Note that the WSWS focuses on issues of free speech, not on the issues of Ukrainian drone hits on Russian oil facilities and supposed gasoline shortages - claims which Alexander Mercouris sharply critiques today with his characteristic and perhaps justified complacency, as he notes an absence of impact of these attacks on Russisan economic indices, although one would like to see a broader range of sources on this important matter).

But the background that is painted in the WSWS article offers a disturbing reading of Putin’s speech and comments at Valdai this week where he exhibited a general sympathy for and understsanding of Trump, even extending praise for Trump’s efforts to bring about peace in the Middle East - a statement which, while open to interpretation as ironic, was, on its face, disgraceful, given the massive war crimes for which Trump is responsible in his support for Zionist genocide in Gaza, the long sequence of horrific US supported or tolerated Israeli crimes in its routine assaults against Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Hamas and Hezbollah and, above all, Iran.

While none of these events appears to have significantly dented Putin’s long-standing overwhelming popularity at home, there is also growing evidence across Russia of impatience with the Special Military Operation and a yearning either for a negotiated settlement or - and these things are very different, of course - a more severe military response than anything yet contemplated.

On such topics as Tomahawks or comparable long-range missiles, seizing ships on the high seas, or the retreat of Finland and Sweden from neutrality and their new threats to Russia and Russian shipping in the Baltic and to the city of Saint Petersburg, Russia’s second largest, Putin’s answers are supremely reasonable, admit to the damage that might be done to relations between the US and Russia, but are far, far too soft, if not weak.

We have a strange and worryingly ineffectual mixture of weak rhetoric and semi-tolerance for the gross violation of Russian red lines. This is the kind of weakness that showed itself in Russia’s relative silence after the egregious international crimes committed by the West against its former ally, Assad’s Syria, and against Iran in the 12-day war. Why should Putin care about Russian relations with the US if it remains clear to any analyst that US foreign policy continues today as much as it did in 2002 and in the former Wolfowitz Doctrine and similar sentiments going back to the Monroe doctrine of 1823 namely, US Hegemony?

In the conflict over Ukraine, and the interrelated conflicts in Asia (Taiwan, South China Sea and color revolution manouvers aross the periphery of China), the Middle East (Israel, Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq) and in Latin America (most imminently, Venezuela) the people of the world have either lost to the oligarchs already or are in swift decline, and so they are too in Ukraine, Europe, the USA, and in Russia.

This is a narrative of tragic, perhaps catastrophic, and generalized loss.