THERE’S more, so much more, that we can do. Yes, Britain is arming Ukraine; yes, we pushed for the toughest economic sanctions against Russia, blocking access to the Swift banking system. But this is a war for the future – the future not just of Ukraine, but of Europe and the democratic world. Every weapon at our disposal should be in play.

To start, throw open our doors to Ukrainian refugees immediately. If Ukrainians can stop tanks by standing in the street, we can find homes for their citizens. Kick all Russian diplomats out of Britain, then expel any oligarch connected to Vladimir Putin. In fact, double up: seize the oligarchs’ mansions and turn them into refugee reception centres for Ukrainians. Shut down all Russian media in Britain. British politicians who’ve given any succour to the Kremlin need cast adrift, ostracised. The sanctions regime must be made watertight: no Russian tankers sneaking into Orkney, no private jets owned by oligarchs creeping in and out of our air space.

Russia must be isolated on the world’s stage – cut off from everything and everyone; a pariah shunned by all international bodies, whether they’re for sport, arts or science. The Russian resistance – those brave people now standing in streets from St Petersburg to Novosibirsk protesting the war – must be supported by any means necessary. It’s the Russian people and military alone who can truly end what’s happening – and in truth, we all know the only end which will really bring peace to the world is Putin either dead or in the dock at the Hague.

He’s a war criminal, a new Hitler for the 21st century, threatening nuclear annihilation. His regime needs broken; he must fall. The West cannot take him on directly by military means – that would ensure nuclear war in Europe – so hope lies with the bravest Russians. We must stand with them too.

If Putin doesn’t fall, if Ukraine isn’t saved – if the liberal democracies don’t stand firm – our future crumbles. Make no mistake, this is a war about the future. Will the future of the 21st century be one of democracy or autocracy; one of law or one of brutality? Putin threatens a new dark age.

Yet what’s happening now isn’t merely about the future. What’s happening now has been shaped by the past. Our collective weakness paved Putin’s path into Ukraine: our weakness over Crimea, over Georgia, over assassinations carried out by his hitmen around the world. Putin should have been isolated and humiliated years ago; instead we emboldened him.

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Our own hypocrisy has also been banked up by Putin. He watched while Britain and America led an illegal invasion of a sovereign nation, Iraq. What were we saying to him when we carried out this appalling crime? That rules don’t matter, that lies win the day, that might makes right.

We’ve ramped up brutality around the world, in stricken countries like Yemen, and turned blind eyes to repression in Palestine. Putin watched and learned. He watched us high-tail it from Afghanistan, leaving innocent civilians to their fate at the hands of the Taliban. He watched as we allowed his propaganda machine to turn us against each other, to ramp up petty divisions among ordinary westerners which ate away at our democracy.

Putin’s actions demand that we learn from our past so we can save the future; that we never make the same mistakes again. If brutality is wrong in Ukraine, then it’s always wrong. Civilians matter whether in Kyiv or Baghdad.

But here’s the great irony of Putin’s evil: his actions have cemented the West just as our foundations shook to their core. Democracy was on the ropes across the western world. We were tearing each other apart. Now we’re mostly united. There’s something of the child’s fable about this all: we danced to the edge of the precipice, saw what we could lose, then stopped.

Putin puts our feuds to bed. For the best part of a generation now people across the West have been warring with each other over "identity", over the myriad matters which separate us. Ukraine presses pause on the division which have occupied western minds for years. Truly, we can fall out without tearing ourselves apart. We must now be serious people, for serious times. The future demands that from us.

There’s only two identities now: those on the side of democracy and everyone else. If – when – we get to the far side of this horror, the time of the extremist, one prays, will be done in the West. We must be finished with the Trumps of this world. We need to remember those on the far left and far right who, right now, defend Russia or both-side the war, and make sure they’ve no say or influence in our society any more.

What emerges from this period of history could be the stuff of our worst nightmares or it could start to lay the path to a much better world. If we fail, then we enter a period of democratic death, when freedom declines across the planet; if we succeed – whatever success really means at this early stage of conflict – then pray we come to our senses once it’s all finally over; that we realise we came within a hair’s breadth of helping a fascist dictator destroy our own way of life, and respond to that by building a better world where democracy lives up to its own ideals.

To defend our democracies, we all of us must believe in democracy, and for too long our governments and political parties have failed; they sowed the seeds of doubt about the good of democracy. If we’re now in the foothills of the future, then that future – if the gods are with us and decency prevails – must be predicated on democratic renewal and the creation of a political world here in the West which we at home cherish and the rest of the world admires. The path to where we are now – this terrible present – was paved by our unforgivable historic mistakes. For the sake of the future, and our children who will be born in that future, we need to learn and change.

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