Big History

The New Cold Warriors had better hope that Russia won, because there would not be much of a Cold War if it had been established that the formidable Russian military machine did not exist after all.

For all the mythology about Britain or Israel, nowhere ever won a war by being either plucky or lucky. If Russia could be defeated by Ukraine, then Russia must be weak. The spectre of it would therefore stand no chance of frightening anybody into anything, whether hot war, loss of civil liberties, lucrative contracts for the shareholders of arms companies, or anything else in the New Cold War.

And Cold will be the word. Some of us have been arguing forever that Britain needed, and could have, an all-of-the-above energy policy that would, among other good things, free us from any need to take the slightest interest either in Arab oil or in Russian gas.

But that cannot be magicked up overnight, and in the meantime people are unlikely to bear a generation of shivering in the dark before discovering heat and light as if for the first time. This war has started in the spring. Our people would put up with one winter of energy sanctions against Russia, and no more. You know it.

Forget about the Blitz spirit. Someone has fed Volodymyr Zelensky that cod Churchillian rhetoric, but the Fight Them On The Beaches speech was not heard at the time by anyone who did not happen to be in the House of Commons on 4th June 1940. The recording of it was made by Winston Churchill as a commercial product after the War. The same is true of the Blood Toil, Tears and Sweat speech of 13th May, although he did read out the Finest Hour speech as a radio broadcast on the evening of 18th June, having delivered it to the House that afternoon.

The 44-year-old Zelensky is foolish to invite comparison with Churchill, who was recognised as the wrong leader for post-War reconstruction, but who was conveniently in his seventies by then. Zelensky is talking himself into Arnold Schwarzenegger's career in reverse, heading off to Hollywood after politics.

But of course Ukraine is not really being run by a comedian who played the President in a sitcom before winning the Presidency in a campaign conducted almost entirely on social media. It is being run by people who are as nasty as the people who run Russia. In a crowded field, Ukraine is probably the most corrupt country in Europe. On this International Women's Day, consider that Ukraine is a major global centre of the traffic in women.

Via Turkey, of course, the people running Ukraine are now bringing in IS fighters from Syria. Funny how no one who was allowed at the table ever talks about energy independence from Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates. Yemen? Did somebody say Yemen? And the EU has been happy to drown black and brown refugees in the Mediterranean. Even now, it is turning them back at the Ukrainian border.

Sadly, of the old KGB clique around Vladimir Putin, and the Nazi militias at whose pleasure anyone is President of Ukraine, one or the other is going to have to win. We are then going to have to deal with whichever of them it was. The real world is not a sitcom.