Pages That Would Help You Understand

There was a cost of living crisis before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Do not allow your memory to be clouded. Vladimir Putin is to blame for a lot, but the blame for the fact that you will soon barely be able to live, if you are not already in that position, lies at home, and not with only one political party.

If Volodymyr Zelensky had said a month ago what he said yesterday, then there would never have been a war. He now accepts what has always been the fact that Ukraine would never be let into NATO, so it is no longer trying. If even a country that has been invaded by Russia does not want to be in NATO, then why should anywhere else?

Tony Blair may have usefully confirmed that we opponents of a no-fly zone were right by calling for one, but the hawks are in one of their customarily ridiculous positions, this time holding to a much more belligerent line that Zelensky's own. That, and their continued screeching for a lucrative New Cold War, even though this conflict has already gone on long enough to show that, as some of us had said all along, the mighty Russian military machine simply did not exist.

Time was when they could have had a Cold War with nothing, but those days are gone. Not least because Cold would be word. The harnessing of the power of the State to secure energy independence, as some of us have been advocating from the outer margins since time immemorial, would take decades. In the meantime, our people would not be prepared to spend much of every year shivering in the dark. They would not be prepared to spend much of any year shivering in the dark.

Nor, as has become clear today, would they regard Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates as an acceptable alternative. If Marina Ovsyannikova had done in Riyadh what she did in Moscow, then she would be dead. Indeed, anyone who did anything like that would very soon be facing imprisonment for 10 years here in Britain, the country that now stands on the brink of imposing a de facto death sentence on Julian Assange for having published the truth.

In any case, Saudi Arabia is now considering selling its oil in yuan. A whole new world is opening up. Beginning with the dressed up but unmistakable recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea, recognition of some sort of Russian suzerainty over the Donbas, adoption of constitutional neutrality by Ukraine, and really quite ruthless suppression of the Nazi militias there.

That suppression ought to be made a lot easier by the fact that those militias would then be fighting against their own Government. That Government would be backed, at least for that purpose, not only by Russia, but by everywhere behind it. Check the abstention list at the UN General Assembly.

Watch out for the dismantlement of those biolabs, which, if they were harmless, would be in the United States rather than in Ukraine, and would be run by the Department of Health and Human Services or by the Department of Education, not by the Department of Defense. If they do not have biological weapons in them, then why the fear of their falling into Russian hands?

And watch out for the Prime Minister's new line on the whole business, pretending to have thought it from the start, and speaking to the nation only from behind the paywall of his once and future employer, the Daily Telegraph. If Boris Johnson survived until the next General Election, then he would win it. His million pound column in the Telegraph would then begin while he was still in Downing Street. On paper or online, buy it, or have no idea what the Prime Minister was thinking. This week, that began.