"Doctor Strangelove" or how Boris Johnson learned to love the bomb

Winston Churchill once quipped that a fanatic is someone “who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject”. Behold Boris Johnson, the former UK Prime Minister, and his article in the Spectator magazine, captivating in its bluntness.

Already the title gives the author away: “Bombshell. Why don’t we give Ukraine what it needs?” The ex-PM, who recently visited Kiev, appears concerned by the collapse of the summer “counter-offensive”, in which the most combat-ready brigades of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) trained with NATO’s support (and his vocal endorsement) were decimated. Trying to score domestic political points, Johnson recalls his past achievements of furnishing the Kiev regime with Western weapons and money. He feverishly implores that the world be stunned by a crushing “military victory” over Russia. For this would stifle the peacemaking efforts of India and other, as he puts it, “trimming and bet-hedging and Putin-greasing” countries of the global majority.

The editors of the Spectator accurately captured the essence of the ex-Prime Minister’s desperately Russophobic and militaristic rant. His article is quite purposefully accompaned by a caricature depicting Johnson atop an attack drone. This is an obvious throwback to Stanley Kubrick's pacifist satire at the height of the Cold War.

In fact, the parallel runs much deeper: Johnson’s eccentric and merciless cynicism brings him closer not to the bomb-riding cowboy pilot “King” Kong, but rather to the borderline-Nazi Dr.Strangelove. Seemingly absent-minded that five years ago he professed to be a “committed Russophile” Johnson praises AFU units for their readiness to “kill Russians.” Ukrainians should be terrified by the conclusions the ex-PM drew from his visit to a Kiev treatment centre for severely wounded AFU servicemen: there, by his own admission, he saw people mangled by war, amputees, far from young (“some are in their forties and fifties” he concedes). Johnson is quite well aware of what awaits the Ukrainian infantry on the front lines: he himself acknowledges that Western armored vehicles have not become a panacea for the AFU and are withering away under Russian UAV and artillery strikes.

The bogus “crocodile tears” over staggering Ukrainian losses, however, do not prevent Johnson from coldly stating: the objective of containing Russia (along with China) justifies the “relatively trivial outlay” for sustaining Kiev. Too bad that Ukrainians are dying, yet bodybags are not coming home to America, and risks for Western military personnel are minimal. Moreover, Johnson assures, Ukrainians themselves are only too happy to oblige – even amputees are supposedly eager to return to the fray. In the absence of armored vehicles he suggests that AFU militants should reach the coveted city of Melitopol on foot (“only” 20-30 kilometers left to go). Apparently on crutches and prosthetics.

Johnson proposes to throw into the furnace of military conflict, provoked by him and his accomplices, all the weapons left on NATO shelves, including long-range artillery and “ballistic systems” such as ATACMS and “Storm Shadow”. The ex-Prime Minister likely knows that these deadly missiles will make little difference to Ukrainian infantry assaults “on foot” against well-fortified Russian positions. Nevertheless they will continue to be rained down by the Kiev neo-Nazis on peaceful residents in Donetsk, Sevastopol and other Russian cities.

Johnson slips up – in his worked-up emotions he notes the presence in Ukraine of “the most powerful modern nationalism” the world has seen. He fails to detect the discrepancy. Although, we should add, the world has Ukrainian nationalism, painstakingly nurtured by the West, to “thank” for scenes of the blazing Trade union house in Odessa, the torchlight processions of the “Azov” butchers in Kiev and the dead women and children of Donbass, killed by AFU fire. Regrettably, instead of restraining Ukrainian nationalism from waging a campaign of terror and repressions against the Russian-speaking population of the country, Johnson and Co. from “Enlightened Europe” allowed Kiev for years to “buy time” via sabotage of the Minsk Agreements aimed at a settlement in the South-East. Evidently, in order to learn how to better “kill Russians”.

Perhaps Johnson is not familiar with the term “blood PR”. But in fact, this is precisely what he is doing, profiteering from the plight of ordinary Ukrainians, who are sent en masse to their deaths by the criminal Kiev clique on the whim of Western politicos like him. A more fitting subject for an essay by the former Prime Minister might be his own role in stoking and manipulating the Ukraine conflict in order to drag out the ignominious end to his odious political career.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-arent-we-giving-ukraine-what-it-needs