Of course it is bonkers to say Ukraine began the conflict. But here is what I believe Donald Trump’s attempting to attain: BORIS JOHNSON
Well, folks, it has been a bad few days for the truth. But yesterday we reached clinical levels of insanity. As I write, the US State Department is demanding that we sandpaper the G7 communique on the third anniversary of the Ukraine war.
Apparently we can no longer ascribe the tragedy to ‘Russian aggression’. Oh really? So what was it then?
Perhaps it was a faulty satnav on the lead Russian tank. Perhaps they are implying it was some kind of military mix-up, so that the roughly 115 Russian battalion tactical groups brutally attacked innocent Ukrainian towns, from the north, east and south, on the basis of some idiotic geographical misunderstanding – like a modern version of the Charge of the Light Brigade.
Do they really think that in Foggy Bottom, DC? Of course not. These are good, conscientious diplomats. They know full well that saying Ukraine ‘started the war’ is like blaming the defenceless young woman at the beginning of the movie Jaws and claiming that she takes off her clothes and skips into the moonlit sea with the specific intention of attacking the great white shark.
It’s like saying that American ships brutally fired on Japanese Zeroes at Pearl Harbor. It’s Orwellian, bonkers, an inversion of the truth, and they know it. It’s victim-blaming rubbish to say that Ukraine was in any way responsible for the three years of carnage, and it is also rubbish to say that Vladimir Putin was ‘provoked’ by Nato.
We didn’t poke the bear. What balls. I was in every important Nato meeting in the six years before Putin’s February 2022 invasion, and I can tell you that Ukraine’s chances of joining Nato – then – were about as good as a snowball’s chance in Hell.
Yes, we occasionally paid lip-service to Ukrainian ambitions, since they had been promised membership in the past.
President Donald Trump meets Vladimir Putin during the US president’s first term at the G20 summit in 2019
Everybody can see that Volodymyr Zelensky is not a dictator but a democrat courageously defending his country against an aggressor, writes Boris Johnson
But if you want an idea of the likely timetable, think of Turkish accession to the EU – talks on which officially began in 1963, before I was born. Actually, in the case of Ukraine, there was not even a timetable for any negotiations to begin, because we all knew that the blackballs would look like sheep droppings.
The French would have vetoed, the Germans would have vetoed, to say nothing of the Hungarians – let alone the US, which would have been obliged, under Article 5, to produce a massive expansion of its nuclear umbrella.
It just wasn’t going to happen. Why not? Above all, because people were worried about ‘provoking’ Putin. That was the decisive argument, then, against Nato membership for Ukraine – an argument that Putin has now comprehensively demolished by launching an unprovoked attack on an entirely blameless country, whose only crime was to want to be free of Russian control.
Putin launched his war not because he was worried about Nato – that’s pure Kremlin propaganda – but because he is a ruthless opportunist, who had been in power for two decades, and who thought he could revive his political fortunes with a short, sharp war to rebuild the Russian empire.
He thought that the Ukrainians would rapidly surrender, and that the West would spinelessly acquiesce, as we had during the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Well, he was wrong, and all the sceptics were wrong about Ukraine. They have proved, in the phrase of John Stuart Mill, to be lovers of their own liberty, and everybody can see that Volodymyr Zelensky is not a dictator but a democrat courageously defending his country against an aggressor.
He doesn’t shoot journalists. He doesn’t poison his opponents or send them to the Gulag. That’s Putin. And no, it’s simply unreasonable to follow the Kremlin script, and ask the Ukrainians to be diverted into a general election, when every night their cities are under attack from Russian missiles, and when around 22 per cent of their country is still in enemy hands. Get real, everyone.
Britain was not even physically invaded in the 1940s, and yet Churchill – who held office as PM without a popular democratic mandate – did not announce a general election until after the war in Europe was over, and after his country had plainly been saved. Indeed there was no general election in Britain from 1935 to 1945.
Instead of obfuscating the causes of the war, or pretending there is some nonsensical equivalence between Zelensky and Putin, we need to remember whose side the Ukrainians are on. They are on our side.
They are on the side of freedom. You saw those hideous images of black-scarfed Hamas fighters, whooping and exulting and waving their guns over the pitiful coffin of an Israeli baby. Ask yourself who is paying for the brainwashing of these Islamist killers. Who is funding this nihilistic death cult?
It’s the Iranians, of course, the same Iranians who have given thousands of rockets and drones to Putin – a contribution that is absolutely essential to Russian barbarism. On January 17 this year Putin cemented his pact with the Devil, signing a ‘Long-Term Strategic Partnership’ with Tehran on everything from energy to ballistic missiles.
Whose troops is Putin now using, in his increasingly desperate (and so far abortive) attempts to kick the heroic Ukrainians out of the Kursk region? The North Koreans – soldiers from one of the few regimes more savage and autocratic than his own.
The Ukrainians are fighting an axis of Russia, Iran, North Korea, with China lurking in the background. Pictured, Russian ballistic missile launchers roll into Red Square last year
Putin launched his war not because he was worried about Nato but because he is a ruthless opportunist, writes Johnson
Whose blessing did Putin obtain before starting this war? Who would be the ultimate beneficiary of any kind of Russian victory – a global proof that you can make war on your neighbour and get away with it? The Chinese, of course, and they are watching for the read-across in the Taiwan straits.
So that’s Zelensky’s opposition. The Ukrainians are fighting an axis of Russia, Iran, North Korea, with China lurking in the background. The Ukrainians deserve support fundamentally because their cause is just, and no country should be violently subjugated by its neighbour.
This is above all a fight between right and wrong, between good and evil. But it is also a contest between democracy and autocracy – between our values and their values.
In this war there is not a shred of moral equivalence between Ukraine and Russia. No one in the US state department believes it and nor – I am absolutely sure – does Donald Trump.
As it happens, I believe this President has the ability to produce peace – peace through strength. I remain optimistic.
Instead of panicking at the bizarre and ahistorical language of the last few days, we need to see that the President is trying to shift three sets of negotiating partners. He needs to stun the Europeans into paying more. He needs to get the Ukrainians to sign the minerals deal, which is now overdue.
Most difficult of all, he must get Putin to come to the table and talk – because it is Putin, now, who has the most to lose from a peace deal.
Putin knows he has fundamentally miscalculated, and he cannot now conquer or control Ukraine. That will be his defeat, and it will be very hard to get him to swallow it.
The course of history will be dictated by two giant facts: that the Ukrainians want to be free, and that the US under Donald Trump is committed to a sovereign and independent Ukraine.
That is the right choice because, as Trump knows, the Ukrainian fight is also the fight of the Western world.
