After reading the following three articles I’d have to say it’s Britain, but only relative to its past self. Russia is still in better shape than when it was the USSR, but not as good as it was before Putin’s harebrained invasion of Ukraine.

First up, Britain’s cultural civil war, via ten scary maps:

When citizens perceive that the state no longer prioritises its own people when distributing scarce goods, when newcomers receive those goods but do not contribute to the collective pot by working and paying tax, when large numbers of them do not identify with the state or speak the main language of that state, then things will —in my view at least— soon start to fall apart.
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Drawing on the excellent Migration Facts website, alongside detailed information on local areas from the latest census, we can build up a pretty comprehensive picture of what’s happening in some specific areas of England —areas where the social contract that underpins a healthy, cohesive, and prosperous society is visibly breaking down.

These are just a handful of many places I could have chosen in England today where the vast majority of scarce social housing has gone to people who were not born in the UK, where most of the people who rely on the state are also not contributing to the state by working, where many do not identify as British or English, and where many are living in households where no adults speak English as their main language.

As a result, when Starmer recently announced that he’d be willing to put British troops on the ground in Ukraine as part of a peace-keeping force, one Dr Lisa McKenzie, an anarchist and academic who grew up in a coal-mining town in Nottinghamshire and was politicised by the 1984 miners’ strike, scoffed at the notion:

This is a problem for Starmer and the British liberals who have yet again found their war drums that were put away following the disastrous follies in Iraq and Afghanistan. What was once the Labour heartlands, the de-industrialized parts of the country, have also been the typical recruiting fields for the British Soldier – the white working class. These communities have been badly let down by all politicians have become deeply resentful and detached from what is happening within the politics, media and chattering classes of London.
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his brand of Labour – middle-class metropolitan liberals – will never offer up their own children for military service and will look north towards the very people they have spent the nine years since the Brexit referendum accusing of being racists, bigots, and xenophobes.

Good heavens, Anarchists drawing the same conclusions as Right Wingers like Rod Dreher!

That’s the problem for Globalists, be they Barack Obama, George Bush or Tony Blair, David Cameron and now Kier Starmer; if you trash parts of your own nations as not living up to your standards you better be damned sure you’re not going to need them in the future. Even if it means being a two-faced weasel on the subject of patriotism the utilitarian argument at a minimum should persuade you to not do what these “leaders” have done over the last two decades in the West.

Why fight for something you’ve been told is a piece of shite – mean, nasty, racist, bigoted and the inheritor of only evil things and that you’re the current living, breathing avatar of that – why the hell would you fight for it? It’s a twofer of disdain and demoralisation.

Starmer must realise that this will never be his Falklands War moment – when an unpopular Margaret Thatcher and her Tory government turned around their unpopularity by going to war with Argentina in 1982. Working-class populations outside the big metropolitan cities, in places like Blyth, Sunderland, Mansfield and Stoke-on-Trent, have traditionally been patriotic and supported the British military, but they will not follow Starmer and the failed EU leaders into a battle they see as ‘not theirs’.

She also understands that this is a problem across the whole of Western Europe.

The lesson here for the Western European political leaders is that ignoring sections of the population, allowing deep divisions and inequalities to fester, and then banging the war drums and expecting the working class to go and fight a war for you is not going to work. 

Meanwhile on the subject of Russia, one Rod Martin makes the case that Putin has already lost, in that he failed to succeed in his ambitions in taking control of all Ukraine.

For a start he points out that for Putin and his supporters to claim that it was only about the Eastern, Russian-speaking regions is belied by the fact that Russia attacked in four areas from East, South and North, with a particularly powerful drive to take Kyiv, with the Northern and Eastern ones failing. He also notes the observed failures in logistics, especially for artillery ammunition, that plagued the Russian Army as much as the Ukrainians did in the advance.

To call this a Russian success is false, and to call a failed war plan a defeat is reasonable. The war was meant to gain a buffer against NATO, and in that, Moscow failed. But it was also intended to be a demonstration that Russia was still a great power… It also failed to demonstrate the power of the Russian army. Therefore, except for its nuclear capabilities, it is not a military threat or a great power.

He also points out that since Putin did not have access to the USSR’s systems of state security his leadership and control rests in an uneasy relationship with the oligarchs who he inherited from the 1990’s, and while he’s destroyed one or two, via jail and dispossession, as a warning to the others, he can’t piss them all off:

Putin cannot turn against the oligarchs without accepting a massive economic downturn. The companies they control are indispensable to the country. If Putin nationalizes their firms, it will disrupt production. If he throws the oligarchs in jail, the already weak financial system will collapse. The oligarchs like Western banks, and Russia’s liquid wealth is not all in Russia. Could Putin survive a failed war and a depression? Or could a new president reopen the trade routes for the oligarchs? That is more likely.

As such Putin is walking a very narrow path of survival, not too different to Zylenskyy actually, who has similar oligarchs to deal with in Ukraine. The key difference is that Putin realises the fighting must stop, while Zylenskyy does not, hence his being so Bolshie about it while Putin keeps quiet:

Putin must end the war and hope for the best. The best way to end a failed war is to declare victory and go home. Putin is declaring victory by saying he got all he wanted. But only Americans believe that. The Russians know they lost. The question is not how Putin will suppress dissent. It is how he will deal with the devils he created, and how the country responds if he doesn’t. A reign of terror might help, but there is no mechanism to carry it out now, and later is too late.

Some would argue that there already is a reign of terror in Russia, demonstrated by all those prominent people,

But that’s just Mafia stuff, far short of Stalin’s Great Purge.

The conventional view is that Putin’s only concerns are Ukraine and the West. I think he has another dimension on his mind: his domestic situation. That will certainly shape his negotiating position and the U.S. negotiating strategy.