NATO suffers two blows (see photo)

This photograph was taken an hour before the two girls, Svetlana (19) and Kristina (21), were killed by a Russian missile strike on Zaporozhe.

Their death represents a significant strategic advance for Putin. After all, as he claims and Hitchens confirms, Russia is really fighting NATO, not the Ukraine. Hence the two girls who loved to sing had to be the lynchpins of NATO’s war effort.

Alternatively, they are merely two more victims of Russia’s evil aggression that pursues genocidal, no longer military, objectives. The idea is to break the Ukraine’s spirit or to force NATO to lose interest.

The first option isn’t going to happen; the second one may, if the current polls are anything to go by.

The latest CNN survey shows that 55 per cent of Americans are opposed to providing any more aid for the Ukraine. Even more worrying is the fact that 71 per cent of Republican voters feel that way.

Thus any Republican candidate, most likely Trump, can canter to the nomination on an anti-war promise and then make an appeasement stance a key plank of his national platform. Trump, a Putin admirer of long standing, won’t let that opportunity go begging.

Similar tendencies are noticeable all over the world, from China and Turkey to Western Europe, where the Zelensky government is being urged to exercise ‘common sense’. The choice of recipient of such entreaties is baffling.

After all, only someone who started the war can end it. And no one this side of Hitchens and his ilk identifies NATO or the Ukraine as the aggressor.

It’s Russia that’s murdering tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians like Svetlana and Kristina. It’s Russia that’s levelling Ukrainian cities and destroying their infrastructure. It’s Russia that tortures, rapes, loots and kills Ukrainians, kidnapping their children into the bargain. It’s Russia that’s threatening the world with nuclear annihilation.

How come no one is appealing to Putin’s common sense then? Why does everyone want Zelensky to sue for peace and beg for negotiations?

Actually, Zelensky has never opposed the idea of negotiations. He has a few preconditions though: first, Russia withdraws from every inch of the Ukrainian territory occupied since 2014; second, the Ukraine gets ironclad security guarantees, not the Mickey Mouse variety exemplified by the Budapest Memorandum and the Minsk accords.

Putin, on the other hand, may agree to a ceasefire along the current demarcation line, but he’ll never accept any guarantees of lasting peace. On-going imperial expansion is a precondition for his staying in power, or indeed alive.

That’s why, having failed to defeat the Ukraine on the battlefield, Russia is stepping up her propaganda efforts, activating both her own troll factories and her Western stooges.

For example, Hitchens wrote a lengthy piece last week, explaining that Russia was severely provoked by the Ukraine’s 2014 “putsch”, otherwise known as a popular uprising to unseat Yanukovych’s puppet government.

Yanukovych, a career criminal, did win an election on a quasi-patriotic programme. He then pledged allegiance, de facto if not yet de jure, to Putin, making a mockery of the Ukraine’s cherished and hard-won independence.

Having realised their electoral mistake, the people kicked him out, which offended Hitchens’s worship of democratic propriety. That noble feeling is selective: he never seemed to mind the openly stiffed ballot boxes in Russia. That was all right, especially considering that Hitchens had been writing gushing articles about Putin ever since the start of his blood-stained tenure.

He and his likeminded Putin fans never tire of bemoaning Ukrainian corruption and yes, fair cop, the Ukrainian government is indeed corrupt. It’s not the only one: every post-Soviet republic, emphatically including Russia, has been warped by decades of communism. The Ukraine is no worse than most of them and better than some.

Yet all such considerations miss the point by a mile. Corrupt or pristine, governed by democratically elected officials or otherwise, the Ukraine is an independent country. Her internal affairs are her own business.

The implication that her practices disapproved by Hitchens somehow legitimise Russian aggression is more criminal than any transgressions ever committed by the Ukraine. Implying that, or blaming NATO for the war, is enemy propaganda at its purest, something not seen in Britain since Lord Haw-Haw.

Only one country, Russia, is guilty of unspeakable crimes against humanity. And only one, the same, criminal country harbours far-reaching plans that go beyond the Ukraine. That’s why it’s so upsetting to see so many Americans (and others) falling for Kremlin propaganda.

What do they think is going to happen should the US government listen to vox populi and cut the Ukraine off? Do they seriously believe Putin will be happy to negotiate an equitable peace? Do they expect him to be satisfied with a piece of the Ukraine his missiles have turned into wasteland?

If so, they should stop listening to Putin’s propagandists and exercise real common sense, not the spirit of surrender going by that misnomer.

Once the Ukraine starts running out of ammunition, Putin will launch a new offensive on Kiev – and this time he may well succeed. New pictures of tortured and mutilated corpses will flood the Internet, with the sound accompaniment of lies about the Ukraine and NATO. The Ukrainian army will go guerrilla, and in the 1950s their ancestors managed to carry on for years against much more formidable odds.

Meanwhile, Putin will see the West’s ‘commonsensical’ surrender for exactly what it is. He’ll get another confirmation of NATO living in fear of any direct confrontation with Russian bandits.

Those who wish to know what will happen next ought to read up on European history circa 1939. That would remind them of what happens when the West practises ‘common sense’ when dealing with an evil aggressor.

Svetlana Semeikina and Kristina Spitsyna, RIP