Don't be fooled. The West is not a lesser evil.

Contrary to what you might think from watching the television news or listening to the UK government, Ukraine in 2021 is neither Belgium in 1914 nor Poland in 1939. Nothing like a bit of a scare to distract attention from problems at home…

I don't often agree with Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins, but I think he's got it about right when he points out that Russia in the 21st-century is a foreign policy problem which the West itself created for itself.

It is enormously disappointing to see Labour tail-ending the pomposity and nonsense of Boris Johnson pretending that a small island off the north coast of Europe is a world power whose opinions about what goes on in Ukraine and Russia matter particularly.

Russian foreign policy looks a lot like Soviet foreign policy just as Soviet foreign policy looked a lot like Czarist foreign policy. NATO was, we were told when I was young, necessary to protect us from the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet union and the Red Army. We now know that there was never any threat of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, although many of us knew that at the time.

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO came up with a new reason for its existence and spread ever eastwards. Now it appears, NATO cannot possibly concede that Ukraine should be denied membership of the organisation should it wish it.

I suppose this makes perfect sense given that we all know that Ukraine has a lengthy coastline on the North Atlantic! 

It takes very little imagination to understand the perspective of the Russian state seeing itself surrounded more and more by hostile states linked in a military alliance which sees Russia as an enemy.

It is not necessary to have any sympathy whatsoever for the kleptocracy of superannuated former Soviet bureaucrats and criminal oligarchs who rule Putin's Russia in order to see through the transparently absurd justification for western intervention in the territory of the former Soviet Union.

Those of us in this country who are opposed to militarism and war need to be opposed to the very existence of NATO, an aggressive imperialist military alliance which should've been left in the 20th century where it had already done enough harm.

Labour party members and trade unionists need to campaign for a labour movement which opposes the foreign policy of this Tory Government rather than following on its coat tails.