The weekend deadline has long since passed in Moscow and Kiev, so the chariot of war has already turned back into a pumpkin. I might start writing "Kyiv" when its proponents agreed on a pronunciation of it. We are being treated to "Keev", "Kiv", "Kev", and all sorts.
Some marriages do not last as long as the invasion of Ukraine has now been "imminent". That is not even a joke. Antony Blinken declared this "imminence" 100 days ago today. One hundred days.
The 100,000 Russian troops who were "massing" anything up to 200 miles from the Ukrainian border went up to 150,000 over the weekend, but they have come down to 130,000 today. None of those figures would be anything like enough for an invasion. Russia neither claims the Donbas as its territory, nor recognises the claims of Luhansk and Donetsk to independence.
In Belarus, the routine biannual exercises are coming to an end, so that the Russian forces will soon be going home, exactly as and when they always would have done. Britain's own few hundred, ostentatiously deployed to Ukraine a few days ago, have already been withdrawn. The United Kingdom's ruling party is not going to bankrupt itself by imposing any meaningful sanction on the Russian oligarchy.
This invasion is never supposed to take place, which makes it just as well that it never will. The fear of it is intended as an excuse for anything that our rulers might care to imagine, and they will periodically pretend to have "deterred" it.
Everyone knows that Ukraine is never going to be let into NATO, so why pretend? The fact that it might want to join raises the question of NATO's purpose. It is an alliance against what, exactly? Against whom? There are American nuclear weapons in Europe pointed at where, exactly? At whom? The wonder is that Russia is not planning to invade anywhere to its west. But it is not.
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