PETER HITCHENS: Ukraine's stuck in a stinking trench-warfare brawl. Why is there no push for peace?

Ukraine now has powerful new American missiles which can travel almost 200 miles. Funnily enough, neither Washington nor Kiev were too keen to make this fact public. But at least two have already been used against targets in Crimea.

A year ago, the Americans refused to send exactly the same missiles to Ukraine, on the excuse that they hadn’t any to spare, though the real reason was that they were afraid of how they might be used. This is also why Germany (for now) is not giving its 300-mile-range Taurus rockets to President Zelensky.

Look back to the months after Russia’s invasion, two years ago, and you will find that Nato powers have steadily relaxed their original limits on what they would give Ukraine.

US President Joe Biden has given Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky a $60billion aid package 

If Vladimir Putin is to fall, writes Peter Hitchens, I would not count on him being replaced by anyone nicer

Now, with the release of the USA’s $60billion aid package, we can expect a river of weapons and ammunition to flow into the dismal battlefields of the Don Basin. I think we can also be sure that there will be more strikes into Russian territory, even if Ukraine says it won’t do this. Russia will carry on responding by smashing up what is left of Ukraine’s economy and electricity grid.

Three outcomes are possible. The first is that, a year hence, things are much as they are now, but many more men on both sides are dead or horribly maimed, and more homes destroyed.

The second is that the front line has moved slightly one way or the other, plus the deaths and the destruction already mentioned. And the third, which cannot be ruled out just because ‘experts’ say it is unlikely, is that Ukraine’s greatly increased firepower will cause a Russian collapse and defeat.

This would lead to the fall of Vladimir Putin. If this happens, I would not count on him being replaced by anyone nicer. Rather the reverse. In which case Europe will be more unstable than it has been for nearly a century. Who wants this?

What are our war aims? What would be a good outcome? If you listen to the BBC, you would think that a negotiated peace would be a horrible thing. The Corporation’s coverage on this lacks any attempt at balance or reflection. Dissent has been wiped from the airwaves. For liberal Left-wing people in the West have, in the past two decades, become keen warmongers.

Why? Despite their general sandal-wearing, vegetarian outward appearance, Leftists have sound reasons for liking wars. War increases state power and centralisation, imposes regimentation and censorship and – in the past century – has made Europe far more socialist than it would ever otherwise have been.

Leftists are also Utopian idealists, ready to kill and destroy for a glowing distant goal. Utopia can only be approached across a sea of blood, and you never arrive.

The mystery is why political conservatives these days are so keen on war, their enemy. The proper conservative (and adult) view of war is that it is a regrettable necessity, costly and destructive, and to be ended by compromise as soon as possible. All we have learned from the Ukraine conflict is what the simplest citizen knows in his personal life – that deliberately annoying a powerful neighbour will get you into trouble, and that shabby compromise is cheaper and safer than a fight to the finish.

The war in Ukraine results from the desires of a small American foreign policy faction. They are the same lot who got us into the Iraq war in 2003, who turned Libya into an anarchic cauldron, and who applauded the disastrous ‘Arab Spring’, which ended up with the West condoning a ghastly massacre in Cairo, and supporting the military junta there.

They also entirely wrecked Syria, so obsessed with overthrowing its despot that they allied with Al Qaeda to do so. They think they can remake the world. All they manage to do – over and over again – is break it. They seem to have got their idea of how the world works out of comic books, not history books. But still they sit there.

Others in Washington said, ‘Do not expand Nato’ and advised against the years of bear-baiting which ended with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. They were brushed aside by these geniuses. And here we are, stuck in a stinking trench-warfare brawl which has already lasted half as long as the First World War.

Wise people (conservatives, as it happened) sought to end that war with a deal, too. But politicians and many in the media of the day were too proud and high-minded to do so. And so we got more killing, and Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and the Second World War as a result. The same bloody fools are in charge again.

What is Labour keeping secret this time?

My brilliant Daily Mail colleague Alex Brummer disclosed last week how Labour’s great thumping fist, Gordon Brown, suppressed Alex’s scoop on Labour’s secret 1997 plan to raid and wreck this country’s once-superb private pension sector.

At that time, Alex recalled, he was working for the pro-Labour Guardian newspaper. When Brown learned that the paper intended to publish, he ‘put intense pressure on the publication to hold fire or face dire consequences when New Labour came to power’.

To its everlasting shame, the Guardian pulled the story. About the same time, a Labour election broadcast of April 1997 stated, without any sort of qualification, that, if the Conservatives won the General Election the following month, they would abolish the state pension. This lie is still unpunished. Why wouldn’t they try it again? These people lie and conceal and deceive. They could never win elections if they did not. Would so many middle class people have voted New Labour if they had known what Alex tried and failed to print?

What do you now not know about Labour’s undoubted secret plans to tax the middle class? And which Left-wing media do know about this, and are suppressing it?

Honesty’s not always rewarded

Leonie Benesch plays a teacher battling dishonesty in a school in The Teachers’ Lounge

I’d like to see a British film made in one of our supposedly modern ‘outstanding’ state schools, honestly showing what they’re really like. In the meantime, you and I can make do with an enthralling German movie called The Teachers’ Lounge, in which Leonie Benesch plays an idealistic, honourable teacher who discovers and tries to fight dishonesty in a German grammar school (yes, they still have them in most places). I do advise you to see how she gets on. The film is hard to find in this country but it’s worth persisting.