John Kerry, the US Secretary of State under Obama, had condemned Russia’s annexation of Crimea from the now-independent Ukraine as a violation of history: ‘You just don’t in the twenty-first century behave in nineteenth-century fashion by invading another country on [a] completely trumped-up pretext,’ he said. But that is how the world often works. The US had done that to Iraq in the twenty-first century. In Moscow’s view, history is back and nothing is inevitable, least of all liberal democracy.
