Jeremy Corbyn’s call for ‘peace’ plays into the hands of anti-western dictators

‘When Corbyn blames the west for “paving a path to escalation” by bombing Yemen, he ignores the fact that the Houthi rebels began the escalation.’ Photograph: AS1 Jake Green/AP

Two years ago in Madrid, I watched Jeremy Corbyn launch a pan-European campaign to end arms supplies to Ukraine. As he did so, a friend in the Ukrainian army sent me a photo of the machine gun that he’d been issued with: it was made in 1944. If the west had not poured billions of pounds worth of arms and ammunition into Ukraine, its people would have been massacred and enslaved.

So forgive me if I describe Mr Corbyn’s call for “peace” as a meaningless abstraction (Our leaders seem determined to give war a chance. Their thirst for conflict endangers us all, 23 April). The only peace Vladimir Putin is offering the Ukrainian people is that of the grave and, by campaigning to deprive them of weapons, Mr Corbyn is not helping.