Thirty years ago, in a Ukrainian churchyard where my Russian ancestors are buried, I knelt beside a very old woman leaning on a stick, her hair covered in a black kerchief. Behind us stood the Russian church that my great-grandfather built on his estate and where he lies buried. The old woman was the last villager left who could remember the time when our family lived there. She had been a young girl of six or seven, running up to the kitchen door of the big house, carrying blueberries in her a

Ukraine has about a month before it runs out of artillery shells, and the U.S. Congress cannot agree to ship more. Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is dead. The slaughter in Gaza continues with no end in sight. The Yemeni Houthis are attacking ships in the Red Sea. The North Koreans are testing intercontinental ballistic missiles. In normal times, pessimism can look like an intellectual fad. In times like these, it becomes a starker form of realism. The post-1945 world order – written i