When the future looks back to Vladimir Putin’s murder-war in Ukraine, what will it see?

As heir to the great-power expansionism of the tsars, Putin whips up “unbridled nationalism” in the Russian people as compensation for the Soviet empire’s disappearance. Under Putin’s predecessor Boris Yeltsin, Russia degenerated into poverty, gross social inequality and international irrelevance. Yeltsin’s corrupt governance was at its height when, in 1997, Bennetts moved to Russia as a 26 year-old English teacher, and witnessed the spectacle of oligarch corruption and ill-gotten wealth. In his boozy antics and ripe-flavoured jokes, Yeltsin was scarcely tsar-like; Putin, by contrast, emerged as the master of stealth, with an arch-tactician’s inscrutability (“He doesn’t know how to smile,” one Kremlin official said of him). Putin is the first Russian ruler since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to exploit his alleged Christian faith as justification for his expansionist aspirations. With the blessing of the Moscow Patriarchate, Ukraine has become a battleground for a so called clash of civilisation between Holy Mother Russia and the West. To what end? Putin gambled on victory in a single campaign but now he has to reckon with a Ukraine more fiercely united than ever. The Descent, a searing work of reportage combined with reminiscence, opens a window on to the Russo-Ukrainian darkness.

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