ALBERT EINSTEIN made the salient point that “Peace cannot be kept by force, it can only be achieved by understanding.”

If only the assorted panjandrums who currently occupy positions of power in the West would have grasped Einstein’s point, there would be no conflict in Ukraine right now and no enmity with Russia.

Because the critical point is that in working to undermine Russia’s security with the expansion of Nato, the West has only succeeded in undermining its own security.

A simpler way of putting it is that you don’t achieve security by having loaded guns pointed at your neighbour’s house. All this does is invite a response.

The madness involved in provoking a nuclear-armed power in possession of the most advanced missile technology in the world by advancing the writ of an aggressive military alliance which exists not to advance the cause of peace, security or stability, but instead to help advance and uphold Western hegemony and domination of the world’s natural resources and markets, is ineffable in its magnitude.

It has been accompanied by a mainstream media that has lapsed into the role of cheerleader in its coverage of Ukraine, depicting Putin as a cartoon villain beyond the pale and Russia not as an ancient country whose contribution to European and world culture has been indispensable, but instead as a barbaric rogue state deserving of nothing less than to be wiped off the map.

Churchill’s famous formulation of Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,” suffers from a deficit of objectivity and a surplus of cant. It compels us to ponder the real enigma that is the Western colonial mind.

Fixed principles are a luxury for those whose tomorrow is certain to be as comfortable and privileged as their yesterday and today. For the rest of us, meanwhile, they are death itself when applied to a foreign policy of might is right.

Wildly unfashionable as it may be, Russia is the victim in this scenario and Zelensky a puppet dancing to Washington’s, London’s and Brussels’ tune. Now we have Finland’s President Sauli Niinisto doing likewise — doing so without bothering with the troublesome democratic device of a national referendum — and in turn ending the very neutrality that has been the guarantor of his country’s security since WWII.

The good ship Nato is also making room for Sweden to come aboard, thus turning Scandinavia from a bridge into yet another potential battleground between Russia and the West.

Whatever anybody might think of Putin, he has proved more than once his willingness to throw down militarily when push comes to shove. And, too, you don’t have to endorse the man or the direction in which he has taken Russia to understand that the direction in which he has taken Russia is where the West has led it.

Nato and the chaos its very existence creates is an arms manufacturer’s wet dream. The enhanced status it currently enjoys in Western chancellories on the back the conflict in Ukraine is proof positive that Western ideologues have learned nothing and forgotten everything.

Meanwhile a vast swathe of Ukraine lies in ruins and the streets of many of its towns and cities are running with blood.

This conflict did not start in 2022, it began in 2014 with the toppling of the last legitimate all-Ukraine government, led by Viktor Yanukovych and the subsequent direction taken in the interests of a section of the country’s population at the expense of another section.

This crucial point is of course lost in an ocean of propaganda that would have us believe that what we are living through is some morality play in which good is doing battle with evil.

The real evil is the lie that this rendering has informed.

Finland’s accession to Nato membership is completely regressive and underpinned by the catastrophically wrong conclusions drawn by the country’s political class to events in Ukraine.

At this critical inflection point in European and global affairs, Finland has just taken a momentous decision that may well plunge the country into the dark night of conflict in the foreseeable future.

History can either be used as a guide to a better future or it can be repeated to the detriment of that future. We, sadly, are living in an age when repeating the mistakes of the past is all the rage.