For As Long As It Takes?

We are going to war in Ukraine so that Boris Johnson "cannot" leave office "after all". You read it here first.

Thankfully, Ben Wallace is the initial favourite, and the initial favourite never wins. Penny Mourdant and the Walter Mitty that is Tom Tugendhat are also doing too well too early, and in any case only one neocon Crazy can make it to the runoff. This is not the Labour Party.

Everyone who was suffering from the cost of living crisis should move to Ukraine, where the British Government would have no difficulty spending limitless amounts of money on us, with no questions asked, and with Opposition parties demanding only even more of the same.

Yet there is no British strategic interest in whether Severodonetsk is ruled from Moscow or from whatever the capital of Ukraine is calling itself this week. There is no reason of any kind to wish for the victory of the Wagner Group over the Azov Battalion, or vice versa.

Having lost the Donbas, notice how the insistence is now that it is the South that really matters. Suddenly, it is all about Kherson. Well, how is that working out, either? Not that we should rejoice. We should recognise reality, and get down to freeing up the food and fuel supplies again, while we devoted ourselves to the long-term pursuit of energy independence and of greater self-sufficiency in food, the former a great deal easier than the latter.

Whether we like it or not, and we have particular reason to care either way, Crimea has gone back to Russia. The parts of the Ukraine that the largely Ukrainian Soviet elite had put into the Ukrainian SSR in order to make its independence impossible are going to become Russian satellite states, although they are economically and culturally too Soviet for today's Russian Federation.

No additional state, including Sweden or Finland, is ever going to be allowed into NATO. A much more stable and coherent Ukraine will become constitutionally neutral, and all of this will require the denazification that no one any longer disputes is necessary to some extent, nor did anyone dispute that at all until very recently, although denazification is not being made a condition of potential EU membership, because it never is; being in the EU subjected us to the legislative will of many of the most terrifying people.

All of this was on the table before the Russian invasion. This war has been going on for eight years. But in the stage that the world has admitted to having noticed, it is now on the brink of turning out to have been completely avoidable even in its own terms.