So much talk, but none of it will help the Ukrainians
- 27 Feb 2022
Tom Peck, The Independent
The House of Commons has had its fair share of war moments in the recent past. They usually involve a lot of studied seriousness and some repurposed A-level History essays through which to talk each other into finding the “courage” to help America bomb the hell out of some poor country a long way away.
Not today. The air is not so rarefied when it is not ionised with the electricity of imminent action. Today, they know, it was somebody else doing the acting. They were here to do the talking, and not much else. “Putin will be condemned by history,” said the prime minister. “The blood on his hands will never be washed clean.” All around the house they nodded their heads with the ferocious purpose of a woodpecker going about a willow tree. Their performed animation looked like a displacement activity for a lack of action.
Johnson is not the first to hope that history will condemn Putin. A lot of people appear to be leaving the heavy lifting to history. Someone in the Conservative Party has spent the day coming up with a clever graphic about the “UK” standing united with “UKraine”, the U and the K’s aligning in both. One wonders if more prescient forms of assistance might have been desired.
Ukrainians loading their children on to buses to the “safe zone” probably haven’t had time to count all the countries and people around the world who stand “shoulder to shoulder” with them, yet when they look over their shoulder they find no one there.
And this is why this awful throwback moment also feels like a terrible leap forward. Russia is not Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Syria or Libya or Kosovo or Sierra Leone. Nor is it even Korea or Vietnam or Nicaragua. For the first time for a very long time, matters of war and peace were discussed in which there were at least some lingering doubts about quite who might be the underdog.
Nineteen years ago, Tony Blair used the full force of his charismatic authority to talk that little room into sending British soldiers to save Britain from WMDs that turned out not to exist.
In the middle of the night on Wednesday, a mad man looked down the barrel of a camera and threatened nuclear armageddon, and we have responded with some more sanctions that said mad man saw coming a very long time ago.
As they nodded away, Johnson spoke of how he, and Europe and America, “will maximise the economic price” that Putin will pay for his actions. This will start, apparently, with “ending Europe’s dependence on Russian oil and gas”.
That’s easy for Johnson to say, as the UK isn’t dependent on Russian oil and gas. But he knows the rest of the EU is. He knows that most of today has been taken up by European countries horse-trading about what sanctions to impose.
Belgium is worried about diamonds. Italy wants a carve out for luxury goods. Johnson has called for Russia to be kicked out of the Swift payment system, but he knows he doesn’t need the Swift payment system to pay Russia for oil and gas, like the others do.
People appear to understand that the toughest sanctions will hurt us as well as them. But one suspects Putin’s security council did not spend long talking through the implications of restrictions on Belgian diamonds and Italian handbags.
Putin has spent the last eight years painstakingly protecting the Russian economy from the power of his new adversaries to harm it. The obvious conclusion to be drawn from such things is not that sanctions will hurt us as well as them. They will hurt us more than them.