The Spectator reports on the talks to end the war in Ukraine:

Volodymyr Zelensky said earlier this week that he would not acknowledge Russian control of Crimea, and said that he did not have the power to hand over territory: ‘There’s nothing to talk about here. This is against our constitution.’

 

Zelensky’s refusal to consider handing over Crimea was backed by a number of allies, including Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer. ‘It is Ukraine that must decide on those issues. It’s not for other people to decide on behalf of Ukraine,’ Starmer said in an interview with the Telegraph, published this morning.

As if the people of Poland after WW2, Korea, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Gaza etc had much more to do with deciding the issues that affected their country than Ukraine has now.

Once again Starmer plays fast and loose with history hoping everyone else has a short memory and lives in his version of The Truman Show.

'Other people' - namely USA & NATO in this case - already decided the fate of Ukraine by supplying it with intelligence, money, targeting, training, weapons and promises of never-ending help that can't be fulfilled as Russia refused to buckle under unprecendented pressure, both economic and military, for daring to oppose a right-wing coup in Kiev that threatened to put NATO on a Russian border.

Both Starmer and Macron know full well that when Crimea was re-annexed in 2014 no-one in their right mind seriously expected that Putin would have allowed NATO to march in and occupy the naval base at Sevastopol. The reality is that Crimea, originally annexed for the Russian Empire by Catherine the Great in 1783, was never ethnically, linguistically or even territorially (except for a few decades post-independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union), Ukrainian.

Not only would it have been political suicide for Putin to let NATO steam into Crimea, it would have been a betrayal of all those Russian and Soviet lives lost defending the territory in both the 19th century Crimean War and WW2. Even Florence Nightingale would recommend that Macron and Starmer get some fresh air.

A bit like if the UK decided to hand over the Falklands (aka Las Malvinas), to Argentina when these islands were also never ethnically, linguistically or territorially Argentinian.

Yet the UK still fought a war over these barren islands even though they are thousands of miles from the UK's borders, have no significant naval base like Sevastopol and it didn't matter if an enemy military coalition put missile bases there as they would never reach the UK.