Many people who voted for Brexit did so in the belief that the Johnson government would negotiate a withdrawal agreement with the EU which would be beneficial to both sides economically and politically. In the event, the hard-liners supporting Johnson stuck out for the worst possible agreement economically and Johnson has now gone back on the political dispensation which was agreed. The sanctions against the war-monger Putin have been weakened as a reault.
The European Movement UK writes:
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Virtually all Western commentators are agreed, that Putin has for once miscalculated. Instead of using the threat ("the threat is stronger than the execution" - Nimzowitsch) of his overwhelming force to make incremental gains in Ukraine without rousing the West, he thought he could take the whole country in one act of Blitzkrieg. He reckoned without the determination of Ukrainians to defend their nation, nor of the readiness of Western countries to provide weaponry to Ukraine. Now he has a critical decision to make.
There is little doubt that Putin can conquer Ukraine by force. So far he has not involved the whole of the military, nor employed weapons of mass destruction, but he could do. He has put his nuclear offensive on stand-by. There is also the threat of thermobaric weapons which would have practically the same consequences as of nukes: wholesale slaughter of civilians which he has so far avoided. (Though one Putin apologist has posted elsewhere that once a citizen acquires a weapon he is no longer a civilian.)
Putin could - and should - withdraw his strike forces, but that would mean his losing face. My guess is that he will give up on Kyiv but concentrate on consolidating his gains in the south of Ukraine. There will be a stand-off which will be to no side's benefit economically.
Let us hope that at least humanity does prevail over megalomania.
Please do not abstain in the by-election poll this coming Thursday. With a popular local candidate and their voters wishing to show their regard for Jack Dromey, taken before his time, Labour is certain to retain the seat. You may be disgusted with the current leadership of your party, but cannot bring yourself to vote Labour. You can signal your concern at the depths to which your current rulers have sunk, and maybe even effect change at the top, by lending your vote to the non-socialist Liberal Democrats, if only for this one election.
Of course those still alive must receive full and fair compensation as the whole Commons, including the minister, agreed. But the Wyn Williams inquiry must also establish who knew about the flaw at the heart of the Horizon system, and when. It was not a case of a hidden software bug in an obscure sub-routine, it was a basic system design fault: not ensuring that the accounts at post offices and HQ were in sync. Independent IT management experts must be called. Against a background of a government machine wanting to run down the post office network, it seems to me that nobody wanted to correct the system while sub-postmasters and postmistresses were being driven out of business. The following question from that Commons debate raises suspicions:
We know that civil servants were non-executive directors on the board of the Post Office, and that they were principal accounting officers for UK Government Investments. We know that civil servants told Ministers to come to this place and to tell MPs that there was
“nothing to see here.” Those civil servants are not on the list of the core participants giving evidence to Sir Wyn Williams. How can those civil servants be held to account by Ministers for their failure to act in this case for so many years?
The bureau of Liberal International is outraged and condemns in the strongest possible terms Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine earlier this morning.
While liberal democracies across the Euro-Atlantic space have striven for peace in recent months, Putin has relentlessly prepared for war. We are distraught that Russia’s illegal assault on Ukraine earlier this morning has revealed that peace could be preserved no longer and the relationship between Russia and Europe is now inescapably redefined.
Driven by delusion we know that Putin has worked tirelessly, over numerous terms as the President of Russia, to destabilise liberal democracies and countries that would choose autonomy over clientelism. Ukraine is totemic: only by uniting and proving that our resolve to support Ukraine remains unshakable will Putin know that his bullying aggression will not win.
To the people of Ukraine we insist you are not alone. We reiterate our demand for a coordinated response of financial, military, and political assistance to Ukraine and remain gravely concerned about the safety of civilians throughout the country. We demand Russia’s unequivocal cessation of hostilities to avoid further devastating consequences for the continent on which Liberal International was founded, 75 years ago.
Today's invasion of Ukraine shows the contempt in which the Russian president holds the sanctions which were meant to deter him from military action. He is certainly not impressed by the powder-puff measures announced by prime minister Johnson this week. So far from being "out in front" as he claimed at PMQs yesterday, Johnson trails well behind the USA. Indeed, one suspects that it was only president Biden's pressure which produced any action from the UK government. We should be grateful that Donald Trump is no longer in the White House, The UK measures target a few minor banks and individuals, but not the three biggest Russian banks which do business in London. Nor do they touch five prominent oligarchs identified by the ICIJ: Alisher Usmanov, Gennady Timchenko, Arkady Rotenberg, Yury Kovalchuk and Oleg Deripaska. Usmanov and Timchenko have escaped personal sanctions, though the US has sanctioned a couple of Timchenko's businesses. The rest are, or have been, on US sanctions lists, but not touched by the UK. Deripaska is particularly interesting as he has socialised with both Tory George Osborne and Labour's Peter Mandelson. Another name which has come up again in the last few days is that of Roman Abramovich, whose ownership of English Premier League club Chelsea was called into question.
Even if the most swingeing sanctions had been applied immediately, to the extent of beggaring his fellow-citizens (it is reported that the rouble has virtually halved in value in the last few days and fuel prices in Russia have soared), it is clear that Putin would still have gone ahead with his long-prepared plans. Recent descriptions of Ukraine as a non-state* and a creation of the West, echoed by his loyal followers, show that his ambition has always been more than supporting the Russian-speaking separatists in the east of the nation. Naval and military attacks on Mariupol and Odessa, cities outside the areas claimed by the separatists have confirmed that.
In his long televised address to the Russian people on the occasion of recognising the breakaway statelets, he invoked the memory of Catherine the Great. (There was a mention of Lenin, but of no other Communist icon. Neither was there an invocation of the brotherhood of man, of workers across the world uniting, with which Stalin used to dress Soviet expansionism. It was a naked appeal to Russian nationalism.) Putin, now in his 70th year, clearly wants to go down in history as the man who restored the empire of 1796. Ominously, that includes the Baltic states and a slice of present-day Poland.
Economics is not going to deter him, even protests from his oligarch cronies. Only massive casualties on the scale of Afghanistan seem likely to turn the Russian people against him.
*China must be reluctant to support publicly Putin's recognition of Luhansk and Donetsk, because that would weaken her case against Taiwan's right to exist. However, if Putin establishes the concept that "the" Ukraine was always really a part of Russia, then China might come on board.
Following on from my post of two days ago, yet another example of why we need Good Law Project to survive:
Good Law Project has seen documents showing the Government misled Parliament, the National Audit Office and the High Court about the size of the illegal VIP lane it adopted, which advantaged associates of Government Ministers.President Putin, in his attempt to go down in history as the man who recreated the Russian empire of Catherine the Great, has been following the methods of Tigran Petrosian. (Catherine was from Germany and Petrosian from Armenia, by the way.) Petrosian was the chess grandmaster who became world champion through the accumulation of advantages, gradually restricting his opponents' freedom of movement and building pressure on their weak spots. His contemporary, the Latvian Mikhail Tal, was the opposite, going for all-out attack, sacrificing pawns and pieces with gay abandon in the process.
If Putin had attempted an immediate Anschluss with Ukraine as soon as he became commander-in-chief of Russian forces, the response by Western powers would surely have been more vigorous. Instead, he has reached an advantageous end-game step by step. First, the insurgency in the Donbas by his proxies followed by testing the resolve of the West by shooting down MH17 - perhaps the only move which would have deserved a !? in a commentary. Then military exercises (shades of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968) with the participation of a willing partner, the bordering state of Byelorussia, ensuring that there was enough military force to prevent a counter to the next move which he carried out yesterday. Russia recognised the independence of two statelets comprising the Donbas region and at the same time moved massive "peacekeeping" forces their, presumably responding to a "plea for assistance" from the leaders of Luhansk and Donetsk under the friendship and cooperation pact also signed yesterday.
The West is handicapped by not having a single controlling presence with the strategic abilities to match Putin. Instead, we are in something like a consultation match. In theory, the more players who are part of a consultation, the more likely they are to produce brilliant moves to counter the grandmaster. In practice, what usually emerges from such a committee is the "safest" move. In the present situation, that is the threat of sanctions. Whether this will be enough in the face of overwhelming military force in eastern Ukraine remains to be seen.
