Last week, for the first time in a month, Ukraine ceased to be top of the news. First it was the P&O lockout then the “biggest drop in living standards” that dominated the front pages and programmes like Question Time.

Well, living standards are certainly dropping in Mariupol, where 90 per cent of the buildings have been damaged and 200,000 people have been providing target practice for the Russian artillery.

They don’t have to worry about gas bills there because there isn’t any.

Journalism is about novelty, of course, and news organisations are always looking for the next big thing. But we can’t risk allowing the war in Ukraine to be normalised.

Those interviews with refugees and other victims may all sound the same – human misery generally does – but we can’t allow this European crisis to become just another war.

Already on Twitter, Ukraine is being reframed as precisely that. We weren’t obsessed with Russian bombing of Aleppo, say tweeps, so why should Ukrainian cities be any different? Is it just because the people are white, say the identitarians of the left? Many regard Poland’s decision to welcome Ukrainian refugees, after blocking Syrian refugees, as proof positive of racist double standards.

No excuses

THIS is built upon the Corbynists’ earlier attempt to reframe the war by moral equivalence. Isn’t it really Nato’s fault, said Stop the War, for its military build-up on Russia’s border? Ukraine was historically part of Russia, wasn’t it? And anyway, didn’t Britain and America invade Iraq in 2003? And what about Palestine, and what about ...

Such attempts to minimise the crisis must be resisted. Ukraine is not Syria or Iraq. It is a Western democracy, a free country that is as much part of Europe as Italy or France or Britain. It has been invaded by a ruthless imperial power without any justification, moral or political. This is our war, a European war, and it has changed our world in ways we have yet to comprehend.

I opposed the invasion of Iraq long before it began. It seemed clear to me that the weapons of mass destruction were a myth. Nevertheless, Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator and his record of genocide, illegal invasions and human rights violations rightly made him an international pariah. To compare Volodymyr Zelenskyy with Saddam Hussein, or any Middle East dictator for that matter, is a monstrous calumny.

Nor should we be ashamed to say that Britain has taken a lead in supporting President Zelenskyy. There is good reason why Boris Johnson was singled out last week by Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, as “the most active participant in the race to be anti-Russian”. The UK started arming and training the Ukrainian resistance long before the invasion, when other European countries were still banning arms sales to Ukraine. If the Russian advance is stalled, it is largely because of 10,000 lethal weapons we have pledged to the war effort.

Boris the war leader?

YET to mention this, or the UK’s leading role in arming the Ukrainian resistance, is looked on askance by large sections of the media, especially in Scotland. This is presumably because it might serve to make Boris Johnson look like a war leader. Can’t have that. He’s not fit to run a whelk stall, is he. Anyway, why hasn’t he resigned over partygate? My colleagues in the media need to park their prejudices and address new priorities.

This is not about Boris Johnson’s personality but about creating a united front and defeating Russian aggression. After a poor start, Nato countries finally began to pull together last week following Joe Biden’s tour of central Europe. America will always be the key to the success or failure of this war.

There is much to do. Europe is still importing Russian oil and gas and therefore financing Putin’s war machine. This must end as soon as possible. President Biden’s offer of liquified natural gas is welcome but represents a drop in the ocean.

All non-Russian sources of hydrocarbons must now be maximised, including in the North Sea. The transition to renewables needs to be accelerated as never before – even if that means onshore windfarms.

The sanctions regime, including excluding Russian from the Swift banking payments system, needs to be strengthened. It has been breached by the need to allow Germany to pay for Russian gas. That loophole must be closed. Putin has also apparently found ways to manage the financial damage caused by the freezing of Russian central bank assets, so that needs to be looked at again. Russian dealings in gold need to be frozen. Bitcoin and other crypto currencies now being used to circumvent financial sanctions need to be closed down.

No excuses

UKRAINIAN freedom fighters need to be armed and cities relieved. The argument about imposing a no-fly zone has become largely irrelevant since in many areas Russian planes have been grounded because of their vulnerability to Ukrainian anti-aircraft missiles.

The West needs now to supply the Ukrainian resistance with the most modern anti-aircraft missiles at its disposal. America giving Sky Sabre to Poland is all very well, but why not send it where it is really needed?

A Berlin airlift has been rejected for sound reasons. In 1948, Berlin was not actually a war zone. Nato planes delivering supplies to Ukrainian forces in Mariupol would likely be shot down. But a ground lift is quite possible. Ukraine is not surrounded by a hostile country, as Berlin was in 1948. It is a huge country, twice the size of Italy, and has many open land borders. There is no way Russia can patrol all of it.

The Ukrainians have demonstrated their ingenuity by turning farm tractors into military support vehicles, not least in towing abandoned Russian tanks and trucks. So an airlift is not needed, just truck and tractor convoys. Scotland has already supplied fire engines to Ukraine so we can do this.

What we must not to do is emulate social media by applying cancel culture to Russian ballet and music, or Russian citizens in London. Putin’s oligarchs need to be suppressed and driven out of the London property market, but to discriminate against Russians, even wealthy ones, purely on account of their nationality, is as unacceptable as discrimination against any racial minority.

Brainless prejudice

CARDIFF Philharmonic Orchestra’s cancellation of Tchaikovsky was a brainless exercise in prejudice. As was the University of Milan trying to ban the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky, one of the greatest novelists of the 19th century. Even banning RT – or Russia Today – was a mistake, if an understandable one. That simply justifies Putin banning the BBC World Service and other media. We are not fighting the Russian people and we aren’t fighting Russian culture.

This is not the way to fight a modern propaganda war. We fight disinformation by reliable information, not suppression. That drone footage of the wrecked tower blocks of Mariupol is what matters, and contradicts any tendentious reportage by Russian state media. It is proof of the criminal nature of the Russian invasion which has targeted civilians.

This city has, like Warsaw 80 years ago, become the civic martyr to the new fight against fascism.