Bucha's Apron

Presiding in the UN Security Council this month, Britain has refused to allow a meeting specifically to discuss the events at Bucha. The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan QC, is in Ukraine, but he, too, is not investigating Bucha. And he, too, is British. While there is no evidence that Volodymyr Zelensky staged a false flag operation at Bucha, that allegation is no more ridiculous than was the similar one against Bashar al-Assad.

Whatever may have happened at Bucha, do you believe that such things are beneath your own beloved Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, National Corps, C14, Azov Battalion, Aidar Battalion, Donbas Battalion, Dnipro-1 Battalion, Dnipro-2 Battalion, and all the rest of them? In any war, atrocities are committed by both or all sides. "War is hell." And in case you had not heard, real, live, actual Nazis, not over-officious traffic wardens but proper Nazis, are particularly noted for this kind of thing.

Over the last week or so, there has been a marked shift in the papers that think that we plebs are not reading them, with whispers even on Newsnight and on Radio Four. The response to the invasion of Ukraine has consolidated and accelerated the emergence of a new world around China and India, with Russia as the key go-between; last Thursday's Newsnight, admittedly in the weekly graveyard slot against Question Time, was largely given over to this.

The likes of The Times are daring to mention the spread of the rouble and the yuan, with the former now beginning to bust even European sanctions. Those media are also starting to point out the fact that Russia, the countries that voted with Russia in the UN General Assembly, the countries that abstained, and the countries that recorded no vote, accounted for more than half the population of the world, while even some of the 28 African countries that voted to deplore the invasion of Ukraine have criticised the West's double standards. As those outlets cannot quite bring themselves to admit, the word used was "deplores", not "condemns", which might not have passed at all.

Even when asked merely to deplore, then 17 African countries, including the mighty South Africa, abstained, while eight did not vote, and while Eritrea voted against. China gives the lead these days, and the Soviet Union is fondly remembered for its support of the liberation struggle. So much for Commonwealth and Francophonie sentimentalists. The world moves on, and those countries were never colonised by Russia or China. Notice that India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka all abstained, as did both Vietnam and Laos. From London to Paris, get over yourselves.

Afghanistan voted in favour, but its delegation represents the overthrown government. The Taliban's stated views would have been given effect as an abstention. The new regime in Myanmar would almost certainly have voted with Russia, but, again, the seat at the UN is still held by the old one. Meanwhile, all five Central Asian republics either abstained or did not vote, and Belarus voted against. China gives the lead these days, and the Soviet Union is fondly remembered, indeed. There as in Africa, or in what were once British India and French Indochina, take it up with them that, at the very least, they prefer those to you. They did in the decades after the Second World War, and they still do. Was it something you said?

Recent debates have revived the old public school pub quiz answer that "Britain ended the slave trade", starting at the end while occasionally backing it up with trivial numbers of perhaps 100,000 people who were rescued at the tail end of one of the greatest crimes against humanity. Funnily enough, no one in Africa seems to be too grateful for that or for anything else. As far as they are concerned, if they had a liberator other than themselves or sometimes each other, then he was in Moscow, or perhaps Beijing. Liberating them from us. Again, take it up with them.

Britain is now home to people from every inhabited territory, it is ethnically diverse down to every village, and it has a large and rapidly growing mixed-race population. Yet the "Ukrainians look like us" argument has dominated the debate. Of course Russia has committed the crime of aggression, but the problem is held to be that it has done so against a European country. Ukraine sent the third highest number of forces to Iraq. Our own crimes of aggression apparently do not warrant international tribunals, or indeed any punishment whatever. It is vulgar to mention them. Again, even African countries that voted with the West on Ukraine are critical of this racist hypocrisy.

The attitude in Latin America seems to be that Russia has sunk to the level of the United States by invading other countries to change their governments and by supporting their local Far Right thugs. Again, the Soviet Union, however little today's Russia may resemble it, is not necessarily remembered there as having been the Evil Empire. Across the world, the Americans have already attempted to stage a coup in Pakistan because of Imran Khan's trip to Moscow and his deal with Vladimir Putin. Expect more of this.

But even at home, people are noticing that the Democrats can find trillions of dollars for 40 million Ukrainians, yet not one red cent for 40 million descendants of chattel slavery within the present territory of the United States, none of whom has ever been either main party's nominee for President or Vice President, just as no known descendant of the transatlantic slave trade that built the British Empire has ever sat around a British Cabinet table as an elected Member of Parliament.

The war in Ukraine is heading towards a solution that, had it been proposed six weeks ago, would have prevented the war, and would indeed have ended the war that had been raging for eight years in the Donbas. Russia probably also wants Transnistria, but the only effect of that would be to enable the rest of the cut-and-shunt state of Moldova to reunite with Romania, which would be a NATO and EU expansion of sorts, but one with which everyone could live in those organisations' last generation.

Far from having made the case for NATO, this war has demonstrated that Russia could not even invade the whole of Ukraine, much less the whole of Europe, and when even a country that Russia had invaded no longer wanted to join NATO, then why should anywhere else want to be in it? As for the EU, it says everything about it, both that the only country with official Nazi units in its Armed Forces wants to join, and that that country would be welcome to do so, extending the precious Single Market and Customs Union to a global centre of women-trafficking and to the global centre of commercial surrogacy. So much for Ukraine as a bastion of Catholic fidelity. More politicians from Ukraine than from any other single country were named in the Panama Papers, and Zelensky, who was a stand-up comedian three years ago, is now a dollar billionaire.

Even the BBC now blithely concedes that "denazification would mean regime change in Ukraine", so it is clearly coming. No regime dependent on the Nazi militias, and none that was not would even tolerate them, would ever implement the deal, just as it never implemented the Minsk Agreements. Then it will all come out about the people whose very existence had proved that they were in charge of Ukraine. It is already all coming out about the Russians, as it should. But as ever there are two sides, as usual they are both repugnant, and as ever we should have nothing to do with either of them until whichever of them had won and we had to.