If you can bear it, and I warn you to have a sick bag to hand, strap yourself in and take a look at Boris Johnson addressing the nation on the situation in Ukraine on 4 April. The tousle haired twat (and we know that’s part of the act) speaks over footage of Russian tanks on the roads into Ukraine to the strain of dramatic music. We Scots have an idiom called ‘the dry boak’ and even thinking about it brings that on in me. He even has a massive pimple on the end of his snout making him look more ridiculous than ever. Surely Carrie has some concealer somewhere in her handbag.
Boris heaps high praise on the Ukrainians for their bravery (‘courage and tenacity’) in defending their country and how we are ‘lost in admiration for their courage and patriotism’. Apparently, according to the blonde haired buffoon we have been arming them since 2015—that’s seven years—for this eventuality. That was called Operation ORBITAL (who knew?) and we trained 22,000 troops for the eventual defence of their homeland. It’s worth noting that the 22,000 Ukrainian troops we trained is more than double the number of troops we recently cut from our own army. If only we had devoted similar resources to seeing what it was that ailed Vladimir Putin and tried to stop the conflict, we might not be seeing nightly footage of atrocities (notably only Russian atrocities) and destruction on our screens. We are providing them with the wherewithal to kill the incoming hordes of Russian soldiers and, while that is the general idea of war, we have the blood of Russian sons and husbands on our hands. Like Peter Hitchens who put his case eloquently on TalkRADIO on 4 April (well worth listening to), I cannot work out what skin we have in this game.
Putin has done a very stupid and very wrong thing. He has always made his territorial ambitions over Ukraine clear, and we throw up our hands in horror at the thought of him installing a puppet president in Kiev. But the Ukrainians have been persecuting Russians living in Ukraine for years. This was especially acute under the present comedian’s predecessor Petro Poroshenko. Amongst the wonderful constellation of policies that he promoted were the following: ‘restrictions on the usage of the Russian language, on travel to Russia, on trade with Russia, on any social contact with Russians, even those who clearly oppose Putin and support Ukraine’. Not an excuse to invade the country and let undisciplined and bloodthirsty Russian troops loose on the Ukrainian population but, nevertheless, we are not told these things by the mainstream media. Ukraine may have right on their side in terms of international law, but they are not innocent bystanders in all this. Yet those of us who refuse to fly a Ukrainian flag and ridicule the folly of taking Ukrainian refugees into our homes are accused of being pro Putin and supporting the Russian invasion.
Back to Boris if you can bear it. In January we ‘feared this invasion was coming’ and sent them 2,000 anti-tank missiles and we have kept this up with thousands more weapons. This is spoken over footage of a military transport plane being unloaded and taking off. We are sending Starstreak ground to air missiles and Javelins and NLAWs (with slow motion footage of these being fired by Ukrainian troops) to protect against tanks, body armour and helmets. This is in addition to £400 million of humanitarian aid and 500 mobile generators. There is copious footage of Ukrainian flags in UK windows and tearful arrivals of Ukrainians at UK airports. If anyone wonders why our country is on its knees financially, I think I may have found the answer.
The video ends with some stirring and belligerent rhetoric: ‘All the tanks and guns in Vladimir Putin’s arsenal will never break the spirit of Ukraine’s people…Britain will never waiver from supporting our friends…Ukraine will rise again and take her place once more among free and sovereign nations’. I fully expected him to stand up, insert his thumbs into a British bulldog waistcoat and tell us we were going to ‘fight them on the beaches’. But of course, we’re not…yet.
Peter Hitchens asked in his interview, after viewing the video, where the UN was in all this. Of course, Russia and its Chinese allies have a veto at the UN. But surely, if we must go through that corrupt and largely ineffective organisation, then there must be a legislative way of obviating those vetoes and taking some action, at least getting the two sides to the negotiating table. There seems to be nobody who is making a genuine effort to stop this appalling war. Instead, we pour in weapons with the inevitable outcome: the war is prolonged, and more people die. Even Volodymyr Zelenskyy does not seem to be calling for an end to hostilities, instead he calls for more weapons and lectures the rest of the world, along with a stream of other Ukrainian politicians who are interviewed by the mainstream media, on its reluctance to help them defeat Russia. That said, with the propensity of UN troops to commit their own atrocities he may not be willing to exchange one set of oppressors for another.
This is a war between the United States and Russia into which we have been dragged—once again—like the obedient lap dogs that we are. The Ukrainians are suffering terribly and the rest of Europe is facing an energy crisis and potential food shortages hard on the heels of the economic devastation of lockdown. Meantime the United States is more or less self-sufficient in energy and what it lacks it can pipe in from Canada and Mexico. Much of Europe depends on gas and oil from Russia; sadly, without pipelines from the American continent to make up the shortfall. Why we would wish to perpetuate war in Ukraine—and that is precisely we are doing—is beyond me. We can speculate but we will probably never know it all.
Opinions from the Unity News Network (UNN) editorial team & various contributors. | UNN always clearly distinguishes between news and opinion pieces and as an open minded outlet we publish views from a variety of people and organisation that do not necessarily reflect the views of UNN or its writers. Articles published under UNN Opinions are always opinion pieces and if published on behalf of a contributor will contain that authors name at the start of the piece.
