This Wednesday August 24th, is Ukraine’s Independence Day, celebrating 31 years of being free from the USSR. Sadly, this date also happens to be exactly six months since Russia launched its illegal and war-crime-ridden invasion of Ukraine.
This year, Independence Day will be especially poignant for Ukrainians’ all over the world including those here in Crawley, but it also helps to serve as a timely reminder to the rest of us. Understandably, people are fed up with hearing about war which is a horrible thing, and we are seeing much less media coverage of it. There is a risk when wars become protracted, that allies of the oppressed can lose their focus and determination to provide support. With the western coalition supporting Ukraine being a large number of countries, Putin will be hoping that the NATO allies start to fracture and that domestic pressure mounts to stop arming Ukraine and to lift the sanctions on Russia that also cause us some pain. Our resolve must not waiver.
It would be easy but very wrong, to turn a blind eye to the atrocities that Russia is carrying out and to allow Russian aggression to succeed in Ukraine, in the misguided hope that it would simply end there. We must continue to supply Ukraine with weapons and military aid because Russia’s aggression must fail and also be seen to fail by all other autocratic regimes that have hostile intentions to other countries, including our own.
We are facing hardship in the west, with UK inflation reaching 10%, significantly driven by high energy, fuel and food costs. Russia is ultimately responsible for much of this, but our own suffering pales into insignificance when compared to that of Ukraine, where tens of thousands have been killed and over 12 million people have been forced from their homes, half internally and half to elsewhere in Europe.
The UK under Boris Johnson has led the way in Europe in supporting Ukraine, which has been very much appreciated by our Ukrainian friends. This will continue, whether it be Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss who leads us next.
Councillor Duncan Crow, Leader of Crawley Borough Council Conservative Group
24thAugust 2022
