Cleaning London of dirty Russian money would be great – but won’t topple Putin
We yearn to help. Wrong must be put right. Something must be done. The agony was plain on Boris Johnson’s face as a Ukrainian berated him for refusing to impose a no-fly zone on Russia. When an outrage is being perpetrated and untold numbers of people are dying hourly on our screens, impotence is misery. So we loudly voice our support of Ukraine. We hate Vladimir Putin, hate oligarchs, hate Russians. It eases our pain.
The early stages of war are always moments when reason is told to leave. As the drums of battle roll, courage demands emotion and unity is all. The only resolution is death or glory. Talk of compromise is treason. This is especially true in Europe, with its long history of bilateral conflicts that demand to be seen as “world wars”.
There are specific actions that Britain can take to ease Ukraine’s suffering, and Britain has been clearly reluctant to take them. The most immediate is to throw open Britain’s borders to Ukrainian refugees, as EU countries have done with their plans to allow Ukrainians to live and work in the EU for up to three years. London’s Home Office, clearly under orders, turned back desperate refugees in Paris, demanding work-related visas and “security clearance”. There are also reports of border bureaucracy at the Channel stalling humanitarian supplies from local aid centres. The sacred rituals of Johnson’s Brexit must outrank even Putin’s war.
Beyond that, horror at what Putin is doing must be expressed through the instrument of economic sanctions, the hope being that he will see the error of his ways or be toppled in a coup. The difficulty is that the very fact of war as the ultimate expression of a nation’s will reduces all other aspects of statehood to irrelevance. Once under arms, a
Read more on theguardian.com
