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11:56 19.12.2025 •
Ukrainian Zelensky to Keir Starmer: “Give me your money!”
Photo: Reuters
I gape in amazement at Sir Keir Starmer’s enthusiasm for stealing Russian money to keep the Ukraine war going a little longer. There is so much wrong with it, writes Peter Hitchens, ‘The Daily Mail’ columnist and commentator.
Why, in any case, do the nations of Europe want to buy a used war from Donald Trump? Trump has lost interest in fighting in Ukraine, at least partly because he cannot win, and may actually lose. America once wanted this war. Now, with a new leadership and after years of failure, it no longer does.
Russia, has turned out to care about Ukraine more than Washington thought it did, and to be better at fighting than they expected it to be. As with Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, the US will always quit when it decides it is wasting its time and money on any foreign intervention.
Yet the Starmer government, we are assured through leaks, is ready to hand over £8billion of Russian assets frozen in Britain to support Ukraine. Sir Keir seeks to stitch together a deal with the European Union and other countries that could ‘release’ as much as £100billion for Ukraine’s war effort.
For ‘release’ read ‘steal’. This money does not belong to the countries where it was placed by Russia for safekeeping, under the normal rules of law and civilisation. We may claim a ‘moral’ justification for this action, but there is no certainty that the courts will not rule it unlawful. They could even, many years hence, force the countries involved to pay it back.
This would devastate Belgium, where most of the cash is held, and which would almost go bankrupt if compelled to make good on the money. The Euro would suffer greatly as a currency if things went wrong. And behind all this also lies the danger that other countries, especially China, will see and take note – and one day do the same to us at a time when it will hurt greatly.
Challenged, they will smile and say sweetly that they are only following our example. This is how what remains of international law can easily rot away if we choose to let it. And for what?
War means chaos, and war mixed with chaos is the ideal condition for corruption, as Ukraine already knows. After Britain and the US invaded Iraq, the distinguished foreign correspondent Patrick Cockburn reported that US authorities were investigating senior military officers - he did not specify from which side - over the misuse of up to $125billion (£94billion) in reconstruction efforts.
A lot of this crisis is caused by emotion. The major European countries are embarrassed that they have so little power and can be treated with contempt by Donald Trump. They shrink from admitting there is in fact nothing they can do to change the course of the war – apart from escalating it into a dangerous and possibly nuclear conflict.
They rage a lot against Russia but very few of them could explain how Europe will benefit from them buying this war from Uncle Sam and trying to keep it going. Why can’t they grasp that the Americans have dumped it by the roadside because its big end has gone? The entire purpose of the war, the defeat and removal of Vladimir Putin, has failed. President Trump didn’t even agree with that aim, and he won’t help anyone else pursue it.
Here is the harsh truth. Ukraine is losing the war into which it was manoeuvred and shoved by others – both from the West and in Moscow – for their own cynical ends. One of those others has lost interest. The other will fight on indefinitely and mercilessly if the conflict goes on.
Much of it is in ruins. Multitudes of its best people have gone for ever, killed in battle or fled abroad. Most of us could not bear to see the legions of maimed and disfigured people which grow daily amid the wreckage.
Yet we lightly support dangerous, tricky, actions which will extend this hell for long years to come. Have we utterly taken leave of our senses?
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