Home To Roost?

Not before time, the knock on the door has come for Andriy Yermak. Suddenly, they are telling you that Ukraine was as corrupt as we had always told you that it was. Next, they will rediscover that it was full of Nazis, a fact that they used to report as quaint, quirky, and even charming. There has always been a lot of that about. For example, and although in all fairness he himself died in 1939, Kaja Kallas’s great-grandfather, Eduard Alver, was a key figure in founding the anti-Soviet Kaitseliit militia that became the Estonian component of the Forest Brothers, collaborationist exterminators of the Jews.

It is no wonder, although it is still inexcusable, that it recently came as “news” to Kallas that Russia and China had been among the victors of the Second World War, and that she has just claimed that no country had invaded Russia in the last 100 years. Thankfully, Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty does not mean what most Europeans, and possibly most Canadians, think that it means, since no United States Senate would ever have ratified that. We could still say no if Kallas’s Estonia purported to have been attacked by “Putin’s chilling squadron of remote controlled spy pigeons fitted with brain implants”. As, indeed, Estonia could say to us. Oh, for the simpler time of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which although also nonexistent were at least potentially credible, yet in which 90 per cent of the British population nevertheless had the good sense to disbelieve.

France and Germany, meanwhile, were well enough governed to stay out of the whole thing. Now, though, they are preparing to reintroduce conscription, even if the French were initially somehow making it voluntary while the Germans could not yet square the circle that these days, everyone had to pretend to be unable to tell the sex of an 18-year-old. On 2 May 1945, the Soviet flag was planted atop the Reichstag building, while on 31 March 1814, having marched into Paris, the Russian Army watered its horses in the Seine. We must have no part in any of this. Rightists of that mind might easily take enough votes to deprive the increasingly hawkish and Johnsonite Reform UK of scores of seats that it might otherwise have won, while farcical conduct such as we see in Liverpool is inexcusable when the Independent Left is otherwise predicted to hold its five seats and to win 13 more, with a further two for the Workers Party, whose Leader has this evening confirmed publicly that he has been driven into exile.