As the stalemate in Ukraine continues, it is hard to imagine the public will tolerate a repeat of 2023 throughout the whole of the new year.
Zelensky, and Ukraine, cannot win. There needs to be a deal. The alternative is maintaining a conflict whereby taxpayers keep throwing tens of millions of pounds to US arms companies, something as obscene as it is pointless.
In his 17 December Mail on Sunday column, Peter Hitchens wrote:
"At last it is becoming possible to say relatively sane things about Ukraine. After Russia's stupid and lawless invasion, many people reacted by developing a strange admiration for Ukraine. But it is in fact a corrupt, ill-governed and increasingly unfree country, not all that different from Russia in many ways. This enthusiasm prevented them from thinking, and so millions in the West placed huge hopes in Ukraine's offensive against entrenched Russian positions during the summer. I kept my mouth shut because apparently impossible things can sometimes happen, but it seemed to me more likely that the attack would stall. It has duly done so."
Hitchens goes on to add:
"The general refusal to admit that this was so has cost vast numbers of young men's lives on both sides. Many, do not forget, have also been permanently maimed or disfigured, perhaps the worst such aftermath since the horrors of the First World War."
Lacking both an independent security or an independent foreign policy, the UK is unlikely to act upon such lessons wrought by experience, until Washington decides for us. With US Republicans underwhelmed by the war in Ukraine, and Trump the Presidential front runner, that decision could come quicker than many realise.
Way back in 1971, the then US serviceman, later Democrat politician, John Kerry, famously asked the Senate Foreign Relations Committee how you could ask a man to be the last man who dies in Vietman?The last man to die in the Ukraine conflict is perhaps in the Russian or Ukrainian trenches as we speak, or waiting to celebrate New Year in Kiev or St Petersburg.
Hitchens finishes his article with a poignant question 'And what have we gained by these deaths, exactly?'
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