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Tom Kernan's avatar

Ukraine was a mistake by Putin, in that the current outcome was not the desired result and reinvigorated NATO. Do you think the Russians also overplayed their hand, with the simulated oblition of the Island of Ireland. on State TV, causing Ireland to reassess its Neutrality?

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Tom Brown's avatar

Excellent perspective. The accession of Sweden and Finland to NATO, while the subject remains embarrassingly scarcely discussed in Ireland and Austria for different historic reasons, shows how the wake-up of the liberal west will have some unclear lines, as Philip says, presumably in an unvoiced reference also to Hungary. As ever, the arrogance and complacency of the English political class in the factors giving rise to Putin's war should not go uncommented. The bromance between Putin and Farage's UKIP and the Conservative love of Russian money of dubious provenance led directly to Brexit, handing Putin his biggest foreign policy win of dividing the EU, without a shot being fired, and ensuring any investigation of illegal Russian interference in UK elections and the referendum was first suppressed, and then ignored by Boris Johnson. There can be no doubt Brexit encouraged Putin in his belief he could out-smart the West and get away with further military aggression. Brexit was of course sold to the credulous English electors partly on the fiction that the UK should be able to revive an 'Empire 2.0' after years of 'neglect' of the mythical 'Anglosphere' while a 'special relationship' somehow existed with India as a result of centuries of colonial rule which would in future bear new commercial fruit. The English Brexit- deluded evidently have never been able to deal with the fact that if the British connection had been so dear to Indians, the UK would have been the primary supplier of arms to its former colony, not the Soviet Union and then Russia, and would not have sunk rapidly to 7th largest exporter to India. The UK's strengths as an arms manufacturing nation have come rapidly to the fore in supplying Ukraine quickly and without domestic political quarrel. But it has reduced the influence and impact it can have on shaping the new world order by leaving the EU at the worst possible moment (and continuing to pick petty quarrels with it while war rages on its eastern borders). No English Conservative politician can honestly answer the question that if joining the EU and sharing a common European destiny and way of life is a just and noble aim for Ukraine, why is it not for the UK? Or are they to continue their denigration of Europe's greatest peace project?

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