Despite a devastating and deserved defeat in yesterday’s by elections, Boris Johnson remains absolutely right in his policy of no appeasement to the Russians. Last week the PM made a powerful speech just before his trip to Kyiv to see President Zelensky. “I don’t believe that option is really open to us,” he rightly stated. “Never mind that abandoning the Ukrainians would be morally repugnant, since they are the victims, and they have an absolute right to defend a free and independent country.”
It is the last line which cannot be understated. Even in late May, the New York Times, despite its stellar reporting on the war, ran an editorial entitled The War in Ukraine is Getting Complicated and America Isn’t Ready, in which it argued it was dangerous to assume Ukraine could win the war. “Russia is too strong,” it said, adding Ukraine should make a “painful compromise” and give up some territories to Russia. The US must understand the futility and stop “taunting” Russia, the editorial continued. It’s a staggeringly confident opinion to hold from across the Atlantic. And yet it wasn’t long ago that there were similar columns being written here: that territories like the Donbas should be given up — that Zelensky would and should make painful compromises. President Macron has hinted at the same in the past. And these opinions are highly dangerous. They are based on decades of Russian propaganda and our ignorance of Ukrainians, who do not have the developed PR machine of President Putin.
