Was this the week Ukraine lost the war? Or to put it another way, the week the west lost Ukraine? Heroic battlefield resistance continued, Ukrainian citizens struggled on in the teeth of pitiless atrocities such as the missile strike on Kyiv’s Okhmatdyt children’s hospital – but in Washington, risk-averse Nato leaders stuck stubbornly to a route map to defeat.
Ultra-cautious US president Joe Biden, whose political weakness grows by the day, says the 32-country alliance is the strongest the world has ever seen. But what use is an alliance that is afraid of a fight? Rarely has the gap between the rhetoric of solidarity and a dismaying political refusal to directly confront Russian brutality yawned so wide.
