Loose talk costs lives
VLADIMIR Putin must be laughing in the Kremlin when Ukraine’s President is the one urging calm, while our Prime Minister and the US President risk creating panic with their apocalyptic warnings.
Nobody knows what happens next, perhaps including Putin, who revels in the attention and fear generated by massing troops on a neighbour’s border, threatening invasion.
War – a war that would be catastrophic for Ukraine, Russia, the UK, the US and many other countries – is not inevitable, and can be avoided, but it also feels perilously close.
Diplomatic and political engagement, backed up by warnings of tough economic sanctions, are our best hope.
High stakes call for cool heads and considered words, so we should heed Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has dealt with the dangers posed by Putin since Crimea was unlawfully annexed by Russia in 2014.
Panic only plays into Putin’s hands.
Lethal gamble
BY giving Covid jabs to children as young as five, the Government is either staking everything on vaccines – or worrying that sweeping away all England’s restrictions will trigger more deaths and infections.
Giving parents the option of inoculating their five to 11-year-old children safeguards a group at minimal risk, but also slows the spread of Covid to more vulnerable adults.
But expert advisers worry that Boris Johnson is once again gambling with the nation’s health by lifting restrictions early to please a wing of the Tory Party hostile to public measures.
The PM is not following scientific advice, so parents must do what is best for their children, families, workmates and society as a whole.
It’s snow joke
HEAVY snow has disrupted the Beijing Winter Olympics, where organisers had planned on using only artificial snow.
The authoritarian regime running China likes to dictate everything, so real snow wiping out the slalom will have piste them right off.
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