Ukraine now has powerful new American missiles that can travel almost 320 kilometers. Interestingly, neither Washington nor kyiv were too interested in making this fact public. But at least two have already been used against targets in Crimea.
A year ago, the Americans refused to send the exact same missiles to Ukraine, with the excuse that they did not have any to spare, although the real reason was that they were afraid of how they might be used. This is also why Germany is (for now) not delivering its 300-mile-range Taurus rockets to President Zelensky.
If we go back to the months after the Russian invasion, two years ago, we will find that the NATO powers have been steadily relaxing their original limits on what they would give to Ukraine.
US President Joe Biden has delivered a $60 billion aid package to Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky
If Vladimir Putin falls, writes Peter Hitchens, I do not count on him being replaced by someone nicer.
Now, with the release of the US $60 billion aid package, we can expect a river of weapons and ammunition to flow into the grim battlefields of the Don Basin. I think we can also be sure that there will be more attacks on Russian territory, even if Ukraine says it won’t. Russia will continue to respond by destroying what remains of Ukraine’s economy and power grid.
Three outcomes are possible. The first is that, a year from now, things are the same as now, but many more men on both sides are dead or horribly maimed and more homes destroyed.
The second is that the front line has moved slightly in one direction or another, in addition to the deaths and destruction already mentioned. And the third, which cannot be ruled out just because ‘experts’ say it is unlikely, is that the huge increase in Ukraine’s firepower will lead to Russia’s collapse and defeat.
This would lead to the downfall of Vladimir Putin. If this happens, he wouldn’t count on someone nicer to replace him. Rather the other way around. In which case, Europe will be more unstable than it has been for almost a century. Who wants this?
What are our war objectives? What would be a good result? If you listen to the BBC, you would think that a negotiated peace would be a horrible thing. The Corporation’s coverage of this matter lacks any attempt at balance or reflection. Dissent has been erased from the airwaves. Because the liberal left of the West has become, in the last two decades, enthusiastic warmongers.
Because? Despite their vegetarian and sandal-wearing outward appearance, leftists have good reason to prefer wars. War increases the power and centralization of the state, imposes regimentation and censorship, and – in the last century – has made Europe much more socialist than it would ever have been otherwise.
Leftists are also utopian idealists, willing to kill and destroy for a brilliant distant goal. Utopia can only be reached through a sea of blood, and it is never reached.
The mystery is why today’s conservative politicians are so interested in war, their enemy. The proper conservative (and adult) view of war is that it is a regrettable, costly, and destructive necessity, which must be ended as soon as possible through compromise. Everything we have learned from the Ukraine conflict is what the simplest citizen knows in his personal life: that deliberately upsetting a powerful neighbor will get you in trouble, and that a mediocre compromise is cheaper and safer than a fight to the end. .
The war in Ukraine is the result of the wishes of a small faction in American foreign policy. They are the same people who got us into the Iraq war in 2003, who turned Libya into a cauldron of anarchy, and who applauded the disastrous “Arab Spring,” which ended with the West tolerating a horrific massacre in Cairo and supporting the military. together there.
They also completely destroyed Syria, so obsessed with overthrowing its despot that they allied themselves with Al Qaeda to do so. They believe they can remake the world. The only thing they manage to do – again and again – is break it. They seem to have gotten their idea of how the world works from comics, not history books. But they still sit there.
Others in Washington said, “Don’t expand NATO,” and advised against the years of bear-baiting that ended with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. These geniuses pushed them aside. And here we are, trapped in a stinking trench war that has already lasted half as long as the First World War.
The wise men (conservatives, actually) also tried to end that war with a deal. But politicians and many media outlets at the time were too proud and altruistic to do so. And so we had more assassinations and, as a result, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and the Second World War. The same damn fools are in charge again.
What is the Labor Party keeping secret this time?
My brilliant Daily Mail colleague Alex Brummer revealed last week how Labour’s big fist, Gordon Brown, suppressed Alex’s scoop on Labour’s secret 1997 plan to attack and ruin this country’s once magnificent private pensions sector.
At the time, Alex recalled, he worked for the pro-Labour Guardian newspaper. When Brown learned that the paper intended to be published, he “put intense pressure on the publication to refrain from doing so or face dire consequences when New Labor came to power.”
To its eternal shame, The Guardian withdrew the story. Around the same time, a Labor election broadcast in April 1997 stated, without qualification, that if the Conservatives won the following month’s general election they would abolish the state pension. This lie remains unpunished. Why wouldn’t they try again? These people lie, hide and deceive. They could never win elections if they didn’t. Would so many middle class people have voted New Labor if they had known what Alex tried and failed to print?
What don’t you know now about Labour’s undoubtedly secret plans to tax the middle class? And what left-wing media knows this and hides it?
Honesty is not always rewarded
Leonie Benesch plays a teacher fighting dishonesty at a school in The Teachers’ Lounge.
I would like to see a British film made in one of our supposedly modern “excellent” state schools, that honestly shows what they are really like. In the meantime, you and I can settle for a gripping German film called The Teachers’ Lounge, in which Leonie Benesch plays an honorable and idealistic teacher who discovers and tries to combat dishonesty in a German elementary school (yes, they still have it). . in most places). I advise you to see how she is doing. The film is difficult to find in this country but it is worth persisting with.