Boris Johnson sees Ukraine as a present day Second World War – he’s wrong

It is a supreme paradox that the Western view, absorbed wholesale by Johnson, is a mirror image of the very same mistake that appears to have motivated Russia’s president to start this war, writes Mary Dejevsky

How many people, I wonder, ask themselves, in the light of Johnson’s words from Kyiv, whose interests the UK prime minister is dutybound to represent? (PA)

Boris Johnson’s flying visit to Kyiv on Ukraine’s National Day, exactly six months on from the Russian invasion, was of a piece with the man. It was risky, attention-seeking, warm-hearted, sincere at the time, played for effect, and undertaken with an eye, if not to his own place in history (wrongly, perhaps, I am not that cynical), then to a greater geopolitical vision of a time when Ukraine will be vindicated and Russia humbled.

The spirit of Churchill – or at least Johnson’s version of Churchillism – hovered benevolently. A sacred principle was at stake: might could not equal right. Johnson told Britons from Kyiv that all they faced was higher energy bills, while Ukrainians were “paying in their blood”.  It was a characteristic Johnsonian line calculated for the UK news headlines (which duly appeared), and redolent, no doubt deliberately, of Churchill’s “blood, toil, tears and sweat”.

There was, though, a crucial difference between the circumstances of Churchill’s speech to MPs in 1940 and Johnson’s latest appearance with Ukraine’s president in Kyiv. Churchill was preparing his fellow countrymen for a war in which Britain (and its Empire) was then the chief combatant against Nazi Germany. That war was Britain’s war, “our” war. It appeared as existential – to use the current terminology – to the British prime minister then, as Ukraine’s war does to Volodymyr Zelensky and his people now.