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Neal Ascherson, Simon Diggins, John Gittings and Dr Roger Slack on the foreign secretary’s risky rhetoricCan nobody push Liz Truss back into her cage? In her “British war aims” speech at Mansion House, proposing to drive Russia back to its pre-2014 borders, she simply echoed Vladimir Putin’s sick dream of recreating a mythic imperial past (Putin threatens Ukraine allies as Truss urges ‘doubling down’ on support for Kyiv, 27 April). But this is not 1945. The Ukraine war is not going to end with Russia’s unconditional surrender – the only terms on which Russia would leave Crimea. It will probably end in messy stalemate, followed by murky diplomacy.Crimea, casually transferred from Russia to Ukraine on a dictator’s whim in 1954, remained overwhelmingly Russian in sentiment even before the rigged referendum of 2014. The Donbas may have to be partitioned under UN auspices (to the inevitable fury of both communities), as Upper Silesia was partitioned by the League of Nations in 1921. Truss’s insistence on restoring previous “territorial integrity” boundaries to states that the UK supports – Georgia or Ukraine – is to license a bloodbath if Georgia invaded “lost” Abkhazia, or mass resistance if Ukraine tried to suppress Russian identities in Crimea.Neal Ascherson London Continue reading...