For your freedom and ours

This slogan was inscribed on the banners of the November Uprising (1830-1831), when the Polish people rose against the tyranny of the Russian Empire. And it was echoed by Russian protesters who knew their freedom was also at stake.

Yesterday the same words could be seen displayed by Russian demonstrators, 4,500 of whom got badly roughed up and then arrested. They could, many probably would, be charged with treason and go to prison for up to 15 years.

Last night I had dinner with several Russians, one of whom still lives in Moscow. Unable to fly back due to European sanctions, she is stuck in London for a while. Her brother, on the other hand, is still there and a few days ago he demonstrated against the war, losing his three front teeth to a police truncheon.

I’m sure you see today’s parallels with 19^th century Poland, not that I was subtle in drawing them. However, before I put my pencil and ruler away, there’s another historical parallel begging to be drawn.

But first let me ask you this question: On what date did the Second World War start? Most people who have been to school (ideally not a British comprehensive) won’t hesitate to reply: 1 September, 1939. Those who played truant when history was taught, are welcome to cheat and look it up on Google. The answer will be the same: 1 September, 1939.

Yet a contemporaneous European wouldn’t have known that. He would have opened his morning papers, had a sip of his coffee, and read that what started on that day was nothing like a world war. It was merely a local conflict. Or perhaps a Germano-Polish war, if you’d rather.

Things became clearer on 3 September, when Britain and France declared war on Germany. The people realised then that a world, or at least European, war had been going on for three days, and they hadn’t even known it.

Six years and 60 million victims later they became aware of the full scale of their initial error – the lesson had been amply illustrated by visual aids and KIA notices. But they didn’t learn it, remaining to this day as ignorant as they were on 1 and 2 September, 1939.

Now is the time for all these parallel lines to intersect, against the dicta of Euclidean geometry, on the point of the Ukraine, c. 2021.

The other day President Zelensky issued a desperate appeal to Nato to enforce a no-fly zone over the Ukraine. The Russians are using their air supremacy, he said, to do to Ukrainian cities what they had done to Grozny and Aleppo. Rather than launching precision strikes on military targets, they are indiscriminately murdering civilians, including those running for their lives away from the beleaguered cities.

Nato said no. It knew exactly how to enunciate that monosyllabic word, having gained much valuable experience when Putin’s stormtroopers occupied a chunk of the Ukraine in 2014.

Boris Johnson explained that doing what Zelensky asked meant that one day Nato planes would have to engage Russian Migs. That would be risking a Third World War, which tragedy must be averted at all costs.

I agree with every word of that sentence, but not its tense and mood. A Third World War should have been avoided at all costs. Now it’s too late. It has already started.

It’s not just for the Ukraine that heroes there (and their Russian supporters) are risking life and limb. They are filling with their blood the moat separating barbaric savagery from what’s left of our civilisation.

The ditch is neither deep enough nor wide enough. Sooner or later Putin’s hordes will ford it, and then we’ll have to fight willy-nilly – from a strategic position infinitely inferior to today’s.

Nor is it a far-gone conclusion that Putin’s air force would engage Nato’s over the Ukraine – and even if it did, that wouldn’t necessarily lead to a wider conflict. A case in point, if I may.

In May 2018, 40 US commandos engaged a large force of Syrian attackers, killing up to 300 of them, with no American casualties. They then found out that most of those Syrian soldiers weren’t exactly Syrian. They were Russian mercenaries from the Wagner group, run by Putin’s friend Yevgeny Prigozhin.

In this context, the word ‘mercenaries’ doesn’t paint the customary picture of a freebooting soldier exchanging his blood for pay. The Wagner group is an extension of the Russian Spetsnaz, taking orders directly from Putin.

At the time those bandits were taught their lesson, many Western politicians were anticipating Putin’s reaction with trepidation. Yet none came. As far as Putin was concerned, nothing untoward had happened.

It’s likely that, should the better trained and equipped Nato pilots engage Putin’s planes, or even shoot a couple down, no button for a major escalation would be pushed. On the contrary, such a show of strength and resolve could stop a world war in its tracks.

For make no mistake about it: the war juggernaut is already rolling and gathering speed. The Baltics and Poland are next on the list, possibly even nuclear strikes on Nato targets. We just don’t know it, or rather pretend we don’t.

The men in the White House and Downing Street think this kind of pretence equates prudence. It doesn’t. The only thing it equates is irresponsible brinkmanship.

If they think that Putin will stop at the outer borders of the Ukraine, they are deceiving themselves – and us. Here’s another history lesson they skipped: tyrants must be taken at their word.

They tend to state their plans with proud clarity. Thus Lenin wrote before the Bolshevik coup that he planned to drown Russia in the blood of a civil war. And Hitler wasn’t exactly reticent in his Mein Kampf (published in 1925) about his plans for European Jews. Later those villains proceeded to do exactly what they had promised, to the accompaniment of incredulous gasps in the West.

Putin and his mouthpieces have made no secret that the Ukraine is only the first target in their crosshairs. The carnage of Ukrainian civilians is the first battle in the war Putin’s evil regime has declared on the last vestiges of Western civilisation.

Hence those heroic Ukrainians (and a handful of Russians protesters) are fighting not only for their freedom, but ours as well. Their victory would also be ours, but so would be their defeat.

I hope our spivocratic leaders will realise this sooner or later. Rather than preventing a world war, their craven vacillation is a guaranteed way of losing it.