BORIS JOHNSON: Putin has a plan for Ukraine – a hideous and genocidal one. We’re all disgusted at Trump’s betrayal however what’s Europe’s plan to finish this horrible conflict?

Early on Wednesday morning exhausted Ukrainian soldiers were engaged yet again in trying to stop Putin’s vicious attacks on their country.

It was 1am, Kyiv time, and they had been sending up high-speed interceptors to take out the Iranian-designed Shahed drones. Sometimes they were successful and sometimes the Russian missile got through – shattering apartment blocks, killing or maiming innocent civilians.

Then something inexplicable happened. The Ukrainians’ defences stopped working. They could send their interceptors up into the sky – but as soon as the operators tried to get them to speed up and close on the target, they lost signal.

It was as if someone had fiddled with their programming, so that they could no longer travel above 100mph. So the Russian murder weapons sailed on untroubled through the night sky, in their hundreds. They continued to smash Ukrainian power plants, leaving the population to freeze in the darkness, and making nonsense of the idea that Putin was willing to stop striking energy infrastructure.

As the death and destruction went on, the panicking Ukrainian military tried to work out what was happening. Perhaps Russian coders had found a way to hack their defences. Perhaps there was a traitor in their ranks.

It was only yesterday that the truth was confirmed. The Ukrainians had indeed been betrayed. It was the White House that had ordered a technical change to the operation of the Starshield system, a military version of Elon Musk’s Starlink, so that the interceptor drones became suddenly useless. The US gave no warning – and the reaction across much of the rest of the world has been bewilderment and disgust.

We feel a sense of dizziness, as though the team captain of the free world has suddenly been caught playing for the other side. Someone acting in the service of the President of the USA decided wilfully to sabotage the defences of a free, democratic and blameless people, who have for the last four and half years been fighting, not just for their own lives, but for the principle of freedom and democracy everywhere.

Why did they do it? As of today, we have no explanation or justification from the White House.

While we await clarification from whoever succeeds Miss Katie Zacharia, the China-trained ‘lawyer’ who was abruptly ‘transitioned’ out of her role as the new Press secretary, we can only speculate; but we can see pretty clearly the sequence of events.

Without consulting any allies except Israel, the US decided to launch an attack on Iran in which neither the objective nor the strategy was readily comprehensible. The Iranians responded by closing the Strait of Hormuz, leading to a spike in oil prices that is hurting President Trump’s chances of retaining Congress in the mid-term elections next month.

Having spent ages thrashing around, and after promising a series of illusory deals with Tehran, the President has been getting more and more desperate.

So his brilliant diversionary strategy is to find a new culprit for the diesel price spike. He blames the Ukrainians, for attacking Putin’s oil refineries. Which is utterly ridiculous.

It is true that the Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries have been highly successful and they have rightly made it more difficult for Putin to bring his diesel to the market. But you only have to look at the timeline of the last few months to see that it wasn’t the Ukrainian attacks on Russia that pushed up the price of oil across the world; it was Trump’s attack on Iran.

It wasn’t Zelenskyy whose rash and ill-thought-out military action led to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. On the contrary, Zelenskyy has been pursuing a policy – to choke off Russia’s oil supplies – that has been explicitly endorsed by every western country in the last four years, including the USA.

The President has only just signed a giant bazooka of a Bill, drafted by the lamented senator Lindsey Graham (whose absence is felt more keenly every day) which gives the President astonishing powers to impose sanctions on any country buying Russian hydrocarbons.

If he were actually to use this Bill as intended, and cut off Putin’s main source of income, then he could help to bring the Russian tyrant swiftly to the table and get the war over.

The trouble is that he would have to deploy the bazooka against himself; in the sense that he has just signed a nauseating deal, with Putin, to buy hundreds of thousands of tonnes of Russian diesel, thereby making a total nonsense of western policy.

So as things stand, the US government is not only willing to sabotage Ukraine’s defences, it is actually proposing to fund the Russian bombs.

And this cynical Trump-Putin deal won’t even make much difference, if any, to the price Americans are paying at the pump.

It is no wonder that millions of people start wondering again, exactly why it is that this US President is so bewilderingly weak towards Putin. Why does he defer to the malevolent and Gollum-like kleptocrat? Is there some kompromat, after all, in Putin’s bottom drawer? Is there some post-presidential promise – brokered by Witkoff and Kushner – that the Trump family will be given the casino monopoly in some new Trumpski-Novgorod on the shores of the Black Sea?

I have no idea. But it is at moments like this, when things seem so mad and dark and topsy-turvy, that we need cool heads; because, believe me, things can get worse. Every hour, every day, those Ukrainians depend on Starlink and other US help and intelligence. That must continue to flow.

Britain now needs to lead a concerted operation, with our allies, to patch things up between Washington and Kyiv, to pacify both Trump and Zelenskyy.

Perhaps more importantly, we in Europe need to be much more honest with ourselves about the fundamental obstacles to ending the war. We haven’t done enough to put pressure on Putin; we haven’t unfrozen his assets; Europeans still buy large quantities of Russian gas, as Trump rightly points out; and above all neither side of the Atlantic – no one in Washington, London, Paris or Berlin – has been remotely clear enough about the terms on which Ukraine needs to finish the war.

The Ukrainians have fought heroically and they are winning. Putin’s losses are unsustainable – 50,000 last month. He cannot recruit replacements fast enough. But he won’t give up hope of subjugating Ukraine until it is made absolutely clear to him, by the collective western powers, that they will not tolerate this Russian objective; that Ukraine must and will be free, and that Ukrainian freedom will be guaranteed within the western security architecture, and that means Nato.

Putin hasn’t heard that message, or not for years – not even from this country. Why not? What are we afraid of? We should be giving Ukrainians access to Putin’s funds and all the technology they need to beat him off.

But the greatest thing we can give – the thing that will actually bring peace – is clarity about their future; the clarity that has been tragically denied since the country was born in 1991. I can understand the hysteria and disgust about the Trump-Putin deal. But disgust is not a plan.

Putin has a plan for Ukraine, a hideous and genocidal plan. What is the western plan?