A Jewish joke from the 1970s Soviet Union, has a teacher asking a child, “Who is your mother?” The child says, “My mother is Russia.” “And who is your father?” “My father is President Brezhnev.” “And what do you want to be when you grow up?” “I want to be an orphan.” When political leaders turn crooked, statecraft becomes a mafia. What the world is seeing in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is not imperialism nor the business of states but the culmination of 14 years of unprecedented, globalised corruption and an accumulation of wealth that in the 21st Century, since 2008, has found itself bereft of a release in what would formerly have been detente. Greed for money has erased the political artificiality of…