Stability and Security?

This is the funniest thing that you will see all week. "Only between 10 and 20 per cent of the Azov Battalion are Nazis," says the BBC, with no attempt to explain why the rest might have joined, and as if even that figure would be all right, then. "Alexander is a Nazi, but that is just his personal opinion," says the BBC, as if anything other than a Nazi organisation would tolerate such an opinion. The BBC refers to something called a "wolf's angel", to disguise the fact that Wolfsangel is a German word that has nothing to do with angels. And much else besides. This is very well worth reading, and Volodymyr Zelensky certainly used to understand.

Meanwhile, "The £25 million in new non-ODA funding from the Conflict, Stability and Security Fund will help to pay the salaries of Ukrainian soldiers, pilots and police and ensure the armed forces are well equipped with high-quality equipment." We are now paying Ukrainian military salaries. As much as anything else, who was paying them before? And who, exactly, are, these soldiers, pilots and police? Is one of them Alexander?

Oh, and "Moscow's claim that Hunter Biden helped finance a US military 'bioweapons' research program in Ukraine is at least partially true, according to new emails obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com." Daddy Biden has been drooling on that there are going to be food shortages, but we all know that, like the fuel shortages, there are not going to be any for him or his. Anyone who ever describes this kind of thing as "a price worth paying" will obviously not be paying it. Therefore, nor will we. We refuse. We demand a deal with whichever of the two bad sides had won this war, and we demand that our Government begin in earnest the decades-long move away from such dependence on that or on anywhere else.

"Response in kind" is not defined, and over the course of today the red line has shifted from a chemical weapons attack to a nuclear one, to which any response would be academic, if not impossible. If NATO were indeed to supply Ukrainian Forces with protective equipment against weapons of mass destruction, and the mind boggles as to how footsoldiers on a battlefield might be protected against a nuclear weapon, then that would be more than British Forces had been given in Iraq. Anyone would have thought that the people who had deployed those Forces had known all along that those weapons did not exist.

First Zelensky and now Joe Biden are on record that the obvious territorial concessions would be available; like the borders of almost all of the Soviet Republics, that of Ukraine was never designed to be an international frontier and does not work as one. Zelensky has admitted that Ukraine was no longer even seeking the NATO membership that in any case it would never have been granted. Some of us would also very much like to see the denazification of Ukraine, but one thing at a time.

If Zelensky and Biden had said these things a month ago, then there would never have been a war. There would have been, for example, no bombing of the maternity hospital in Mariupol, which recalls the 50 per cent increase in maternal mortality in Iraq under the sanctions regime. Madeleine Albright is now in the special place in Hell for women who do not help each other.