The Russia Problem: why Biden won’t win

Ukraine is hardly prime real estate for Russian colonialism. So what’s going on?

I was on the Amtrak to Washington DC two years ago, travelling through the rattling rusting towns that stitch themselves on the train tracks like algae on a rope. It was profoundly dystopian: dry wall crumbling into overgrown backyards while huge smoking towers coughed grey clouds into the dark skies. Skeletal remains of closed factories and warehouses rotted into the concrete, the failed age of American manufacturing in the final death rattles of two centuries. “Oh,” my mother had said when I told her. “That reminds me of Russia.”

Ukraine: why?

Russia is, without a doubt, a failed state. Despite the trillions of dollars owned by oligarchs and crony industrialists, the country remains incredibly poor. No pride is taken in improving the crumbling infrastructure that connects the outposts of Moscow and St Petersburg to the rest of the sprawling land mass, and no efforts are made to…