The EU adopting Ukraine openly as its proxy, and flooding it with weapons a special kind of madness. Especially when von der Leyen has about as much direct democratic legitimacy as Putin.

I for one do not think Putin is kidding around about nuclear war, and if he’s as insane as *they* say he is, we ought to be thinking about how to de-escalate. He’s already rolling out the big bombs. We’re now seeing unguided missiles and indiscriminate terror bombing – and we’re making it worse. We need a negotiated settlement – and if that means appeasing Putin then so be it.

Frankly, a scrap of eastern European rust belt is not worth nuclear Armageddon nor am I in a rush to die for Ukranians of all people. Ukraine is not a newly Europeanised “emerging social democracy”, and even if it was, I don’t care. This is not your chance to wave your defiant little fists in the air and “stand up to the bully”. This isn’t a schoolyard. There are real stakes.

Nor is this a simple case of nasty man invades small innocent country. This is ages old ethno-nationalist friction – of which we want no part, crossed with a regional civil war. It’s just not the West’s business. For von der Leyen to be courting Ukrainian EU membership and for Zelensky to be flirting with it, is exactly the kind of inflammation that will supercharge Russian aggression. An entity that fancies itself as a keeper of the European peace should have that basic level of self-awareness.

Sun Tzu counseled military leaders to build a “golden bridge” for an opponent to retreat across. Without an escape route to retreat, your opponent will engage in battle and fight like a caged and cornered tiger. With Putin’s first advances having met considerable problems and serious resistance, the smart move is to find a way for him to back off without losing face. But the EU doesn’t want this, and nor does Zelensky. They want anything but an agreement with Russia.

Zelensky has knowingly been pulling Ukraine westward, fully aware of what Russia could do, banking on the West to underwrite his posturing. Being the virtue signalling idiots they are, the “colleagues” have imposed their simplistic binary WW2 narratives on to the situations and offered up every kind of support short of NATO membership and an outright declaration of war. We ramped it up, we pushed Putin to go further than he intended.

But therein lies the hypocrisy. The is no fast track to EU membership, and there’s no intention of going the full hog and going to war with Russia on a NATO Article 5 basis. At some point, having strung Ukraine along, the West will throw it to the wolves, having escalated and prolonged a conflict that Ukraine was never going to win alone.

Ultimately, if western progressives want to meddle in other people’s wars they should go and do it in person and not enlist the rest of us. It is fashionable to say that this is about Ukraine’s right to choose, but where is our right to choose whether we get dragged into a war on Europe’s eastern flank?

The problem with the progressive left’s “everyone I don’t like is Hitler” mentality is that there’s no war they won’t gleefully want a part of – just so long as it’s packaged neatly into a binary narrative with good guys and bad guys, and nothing to complicate the narrative – and no contextual history going back further than a fortnight. Nice and simple, that’s how they like it.

It is true that Putin is an aggressor here, but Putin was a danger to be analysed, anticipated and managed rather than cornered and confronted in the most careless manner imaginable. If there was a role for the West then it was careful diplomacy, recognising the historical sensitivities of the region.

Instead, progressives have made Zelensky their new Nelson Mandela, and for British remainer progressives, the EU’s warmongering is a vindication of their view that we’d be missing out on the action if we left. For people who claim to be the adults in the room, when it comes to geopolitics, there is nobody worse for behaving like children.