The war-mongers will fight Putin to the last drop of Ukrainian blood.

I speak of Biden and Johnson principally, with the backing of the NATO states and Kier Starmer.

Instead of ramping up military spending and sending yet more armaments to Ukraine, there should be talks between NATO, President Zelensky and Russia on how to bring about a speedy end to the war.

It is clear that Putin will not stop until he has something to show for the egregious loss of Russian blood, the damage to the Russian economy and the reparations bill he will receive.

Territory is what he wants and guarantees from NATO that there will be no further expansion eastward.

Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea are already lost to Ukraine. Let peace talks recognise this as fact, otherwise Putin will continue fighting until he has dismembered the country.

He claims to be fighting neo-nazism, but he is the one echoing the methods of the Nazis in WW2:  collective punishments, mass deportations, crimes against humanity, censorship and the dark arts of Goebbels.

 

Biden and Johnson compete with one another in rattling their sabres and proclaiming that NATO and Ukraine must win the war. If that remains their position, then there is no room for compromise and the war could roll on indefinitely, risking escalation to nuclear war engulfing all of Europe and  beyond.

The real interests of the people of Ukraine, those still in the country and the millions of refugees, are the last thing on their minds.

The major arms manufacturers, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and BAE Systems are gleefully making a lot of money from the war. They and their lobbyists in Westminster and Washington have no wish to see Serious peace talks.

War crimes are being committed on both sides, as in all wars.  There is portentous talk of  bringing the war criminals to account. That is just so much blah,blah.  The Afghanistan and Iraq wars illustrate that it is not the guilty politicians who are brought to trial. Blair, Brown  and Bush, although guilty as hell, go scot-free; it is the poor bloody squaddies who carry the can.

 

The sponsorship scheme for Ukrainian refugees is proving to be another great success for Priti Patel and the firm that had so much success in running the Covid test and trace scheme.  The government chooses losers every time.

The day the sponsorship scheme was announced, I filled in the on-line application, offering accommodation for a family. No response. Somewhere in Poland or Ukraine there is a family living in appalling conditions, while my offer languishes, with thousands of other such offers, in Priti  Patel’s bottomless pit of bureaucracy.

The truth is that she has no wish to see thousands of refugees coming here, getting jobs and possibly seeking leave to remain. The ideology of the hostile environment for asylum-seekers has not been renounced. This prize bully is the very last member of the government who should have been given this job. She has as much empathy as a corpse.

Public sympathy for the people of Ukraine is being exploited by the government and the media, being diverted into jingo-istic  backing for war, just as was the case in 1914,for WW1, in 1982, for the Falklands war  and 2003 for the Iraq war.

Keir Starmer is backing the war party, to his undying shame, when what he should be doing is defending the poor against the predations of this government of millionaires.