The Day the Chickens Marched on Kiev  is a great title for a song (props Bill Bailey) or even a cookbook. But it takes on a distinctly bitter, dark flavour if you consider it in the context of what may or may not be on the menu in Ukraine this week. 

The prospect of the Russian military massing on your borders is a far from appetising one. Even if it’s the bully next door that you have been unofficially fighting off for the last few years, it’s still a move which reminds us that, in wanting to Make Russia Great Again, Vladimir Putin is still very much in a cold war coma.

It’s certainly scary for the good people of Ukraine, their neighbours or anyone old enough to remember the USSR. But honestly, it’s just pathetic and we should pity him; not least because he is doomed to fail. Totalitarians always reach for the handbrake when significant change is up ahead; none have ever succeeded for very long.

Whatever goodwill and tentative international trust was built in the post-cold war years is gone now, even if Putin doesn’t order an invasion. And if he does, aside from the obvious catastrophe and consequences, his own people will also suffer the privation of sanctions and global isolation. A century has passed and such a monolithic mentality has no place in our changing world, but he clearly has a more important agenda than, for example, climate change. What an absolute length he is.

It doesn’t help that he might be feeling cornered by the machinations of NATO, western governments and the media. The self-serving incompetence of many world leaders and the broken systems they represent is being laid bare pretty much everywhere, be it in a desire to return to the wild west or the old Empire that wants to strike back. UNderneath it’s all symptomatic of a redundant mindset that can’t let go of the past and has no sense of the future. Even Germany is having a wobble – that’s how bad things have got.

You can’t help thinking that Putin is about to step on a landmine which he laid himself. Does anybody apart from him really want to see Soviet expansion again? There’s nothing good in it for anybody. That said, the Chinese government are keeping rather quiet, no doubt taking the global temperature re their own designs on (for now) Taiwan.

In Putin’s gold-plated bedroom in his golden palace, there’s a hidden door apparently, behind which is another gold-plated room with nothing in it except a very large gold tap and a gas pipeline with the word ‘Nordstream’ embossed on it. And it is here, of an evening, that we might find Mr P, consoling himself.

What’s driving this wild instability and change is far deeper than anything politics and mob populism can fix. We need less of the news story and more of a new story about who we are and what we think we are doing on this planet. But to arrive at this understanding is not easy, especially if there is zero sense of any larger context at work. Fundamentally, it’s time; but it’s been time for a long time now. And time will have its way with us. So, like it or not, we may as well embrace it and save ourselves even more grief.

So keep your gas, Vova. It may be alright for cooking chicken Kievs, but if you’re not careful your own chickens may be about to come home to roost. Or roast, if things get hot enough.