Neither Ukraine nor Russia is a member of the International Criminal Court, so while no one doubts that war crimes are being and will be committed, extraditions to The Hague are wildly unlikely. Karim Khan QC might more usefully look closer to home; to the man who, inter alia, took Vladimir Putin to the opera in 2000 to lobby on behalf of the supposedly privatised BP while Jeremy Corbyn addressed a demonstration against the war in Chechnya.
War crimes and crimes against humanity are inevitable when one side is directed by Vladimir Putin's old KGB clique as it tries to take back control of everywhere that was once in the Soviet Union by bastardising Aleksandr Dugin (as Enoch Powell said when Margaret Thatcher claimed to have been influenced by his books, "She cannot have understood them, then"), while the other side is directed by a ragbag from across that same territory, washed up in Ukraine in order to harness the muscle of those who hold that, "the mission of Ukraine is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival against the Semite-led Untermenschen."
Sadly, one or other of these is going to have to win, and we are going to have to deal with it when it does. In the meantime, however, we should be strictly humanitarian in our involvement in this as in most war zones, and we should absolutely not take either side.
"Ukraine as a state has no geopolitical meaning, no particular cultural import or universal significance, no geographic uniqueness, no ethnic exclusiveness, its certain territorial ambitions represents an enormous danger for all of Eurasia and, without resolving the Ukrainian problem, it is in general senseless to speak about continental politics."
ReplyDeleteBut most of Putinism has little or no connection to Dugin. For example, there is none of his extreme hostility to China. It might also open a few eyes if it were widely known that Dugin wanted to give Estonia to a German sphere of influence, and to give Kaliningrad back to Germany itself. And if anything, it is Putin's Western enemies who seem to be lost in Dugin's rivalry between the tellurocracy and the thalassocracy. Not that much of the thalassocracy is showing any signs of playing along.
DeleteWe shouldn’t take sides when one sovereign country is violently invaded by another? Funny that the “anti war” and anti British Left didn’t take that Switzerland style view of neutrality when it was the United States invading Iraq (or when Saudi was bombing Yemen). Their “neutrality” strangely only applies to Britain and America’s enemies…
ReplyDeleteYou mean that bankrolls the governing party, and very possibly the Prime Minister personally? We are not at war in Ukraine.
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