The cruellest month

IN RUSSIA, history tends to take cruel turns in August. There was the failed coup of 1991 (August 19th); the Moscow apartment bombings of 1999 (August 31st); and the start of the war in Georgia in 2008 (August 1st). On August 10th, the alarm bells rang again, when Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) announced that it had foiled a Ukrainian plot to launch a terror attack in Crimea. Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, decried the Ukrainian authorities, declaring that Russia “would not let such things pass” and that further meetings in the Normandy peace format—involving Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France—were “senseless”. Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, denied the claims, calling them “a pretext for more military threats against Ukraine.”