The Sunday Telegraph, Sunday 5, Professor Gwythian Prins
Ignore Guy Verhofstadt. In the face of EU vacillation, a sovereign UK gave Kyiv what it needed to drive Russia back.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Almost a year ago, the first echelons of Putin’s tank armies spearheaded pincer strikes on Ukraine. The plan was to join up with Russian airborne forces which would land at Hostomel airport, then storm into Kyiv, find and kill Zelensky, install a Putin-compliant puppet government and be home within the month. Instead, Ukrainian soldiers, using fresh, large supplies of British N-LAW anti-tank weapons, blew Putin’s tanks off the roads, shouting “God Save the Queen” as they fired them. The elite Russian airborne landings were a slaughter.
A year on, the first drafts of the history of the start of Putin’s war are being written; and of course they are heavily contested between Putin’s version and that of the free world. But they are also contested among Ukraine’s supporters. Right on cue, Michael Heseltine proclaims Brexit a disaster and Guy Verhofstadt blames Brexit for this war. The facts say the opposite.
With Ukrainians’ courage and Zelensky’s Churchillian leadership, Ukraine was saved from defeat by Day Six of the war by two men and one country. It was good fortune that Ben Wallace was himself a former combat-decorated Scots Guards captain with a hard-charging reputation. If they were to have a fighting chance, the Defence Secretary did not require advisers to tell him what the Ukrainians needed.
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