Tanks a lot Mr Putin

My hopes of a peaceful way out fade fast

IT is recess in Westminster. Like the old London saying that you are never more than nine feet from a rat, in Parliament it feels you are never more than 45 minutes from a holiday.

So it should have been quiet last week. It’s been a long and bruising run, with the pandemic, the cost of living crisis, the parties and everything else.

Lots of people are looking forward to a week off. It’s been days, after all, since the last one. They deserve a break.

Anyways, for a brief moment the news cycle seemed to hit a lull. I was getting texts about holiday plans instead of the usual intrigue and backbiting.

It really has been a febrile place for months. Wild, in an understated way.

Chicken

And then, Friday night, it all kicks off again. This time Ukraine. Of course it’s been building for a while, tension reaching Cuban missile levels. I thought – although this is a vain hope – that maybe there would be a peaceful way out of this. Maybe not though.

I’d been talked into the idea that this was all some extremely dangerous game of diplomatic chicken. That Russia would line up all its forces, watch the West go crazy and start falling out with each other, then pull back. Job done.

And that was working. The Germans and the French were falling out with people, the Americans unsure, we sent Liz Truss. It was chaos.

Mr Putin could have walked away laughing. Relations with Beijing cemented, the West in disarray. Everything coming up Russia.

(Also, the Americans asked Saudi Arabia to up oil production this week and Riyadh said no. Which is, if you’re Russian, a right result and a clear indicator of where the balance of power is at the moment.) Can we commit forces? Not sure. Ukraine is not a NATO member so there’s no obligation to go in there. Also, after Afghanistan do we have the appetite for another attritional slog?

This time it would be against an enemy that has spent the best part of a decade testing weaponry and troops in Syria. (That country has been nothing more than a laboratory for Russian forces. Some of the tech and the rotation in which forces come in and out is frightening.) I guess the question is whether it is still possible for anyone to extricate themselves from this situation without losing face.

A week ago maybe. It doesn’t look like it now.

Mr Johnson’s intervention in Munich yesterday was suitably grave.

“If Ukraine were invaded,” the PM said, “We will witness the destruction of a democratic state, a country that has been free for a generation, with a proud history of elections.

“If Ukraine is invaded, the shock will echo around the world and those echoes will be heard in east Asia, they will be heard in Taiwan.”

And further afield. Trouble is flaring up all over the show.

At the moment most eyes are on Ukraine and the prospect of the delicate stitching of Europe coming apart.

Meantime, the rest of the globe rumbles on. In Mali, the French have pulled out, leaving space for violent Islamist groups to take over.

Beijing eyes Taiwan and the South China Sea, millions are starving in Yemen, Syria is still on fire and North Korea tests weapons again.

Chile somehow strikes me as the saddest of all. There the beekeepers are protesting because there’s no help for them in the 12th year of a climate change-driven mega-drought.

Bees are dying from no food. Because the heat has made the flowers burn.

What kind of world are we running where we let all the flowers burn?