LONDON (Parliament Politics Magazine) – Boris Johnson has said that the Russian president was in absolute panic because of a revolution in Moscow. It is for this reason he is trying so cruelly to smash out the budding flame of freedom in Ukraine.
The PM drew a direct parallel between the Nazis’ actions under Adolf Hitler in the year 1940s and the “vicious and barbarian attack on innocent civilians.”
He also warned that this wouldn’t stop with Ukraine, and that the Kremlin’s victory would bring in a “new era of intimidation across all of Eastern Europe” and “give the green signal to autocrats everywhere.”
The warning came during an usually straightforward and theatrical speech to the spring conference of his party in Blackpool, which was watched by the Ambassador of Ukraine to the United Kingdom, Vadym Prystaiko.
While he received a lot of applause and cheers from the audience, his effort to connect the bloodshed in Ukraine to Britons voting an exit from the EU was panned.
During his speech, he stated that “the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, instinctively choose freedom,” citing the Brexit vote as a “famous recent example.”
Lord Barwell, a Tory peer, was among many who slammed the remark, pointing out that Ukraine is looking for EU membership.
“Even as a staunch Brexiteer, this is totally cringe from Boris Johnson,” Julia Hartley-Brewer, who has been open about her support for the UK exiting the EU, remarked on Twitter.
“Comparing the vote to leave the EU to the bravery and sacrifice of the Ukrainian people against a foreign invader is an insult to their bravery and sacrifice.”
Lord Barwell, Theresa May’s chief of staff in Number 10, said voting in the 2016 referendum “isn’t in any way similar” to sacrificing one’s life in a war.
The PM “is a national embarrassment,” according to Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey, while the SNP’s Westminster leader Ian Blackford claimed the analogy was “crass and distasteful.”
The Russian president is “frightened” of Ukraine
Mr Johnson dismissed the ties with NATO as a source of aggressiveness, saying: “I believe he was afraid of Ukraine for a very different reason.
He added that Putin was afraid of Ukraine because it had a free press and free elections, and with each year that Ukraine advanced, he feared the Ukrainian example.
And he was afraid of the implied rebuke, because in Putin’s Russia, simply calling an invasion an invasion is enough to earn you 15 years in prison.
In addition, if you vote against Putin in an election, you will be poisoned or shot, he continued.
Ukraine is a ‘turning point for the world,’ according to the UN.
He added further, Vladimir Putin has been scared of the effect of that Ukrainian model on him and on Russia exactly because Ukraine and Russia have been so historically close.
He’s been terrified of the so-called colour revolution in Moscow, which is why he’s trying so hard to extinguish the torch of democracy in Ukraine, he continued.
“That’s why it’s critical that he fails, because a victorious Putin will not stop in Ukraine, and the end of freedom in Ukraine will mean the end of any hope of freedom in Georgia and then Moldova, as well as the start of a new era of intimidation across Eastern Europe, from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
If Putin succeeds in smashing Ukraine, it will give autocrats everywhere in the Middle East and Far East the green light.
