I really don't want to get drawn into a detailed argument about the rights and wrongs of Russia and Ukraine etc. My overarching view is that we shouldn't hope to be "world police". We neither know nor understand foreign situations as well as the people living there and we should focus on sorting ourselves out and just trying to be good neighbours whenever possible.
This seems to be having your cake and eating it, where you want to be non interventionist but don’t want to say that UK should have just let Putin crack on in Ukraine. Or maybe being in Europe, we are being a ‘good neighbour’ to Ukraine?
Intervention in the Spanish Civil War may, and I am afraid will, prolong the horrors of that war and increase the sufferings of the unhappy Spanish people. For that reason, and others, we have been from the first opposed to it, and are so still.
https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1937/jan/19/mr-edens-statementThe ambition to not ‘prolong the suffering of the Spanish people’ did not end well. Franco’s dictatorship endured from 1 April 1939 till his death on 20 November 1975. Repression continued throughout Franco’s dictatorship. Spain is the country with the most unmarked graves globally, after Cambodia.
Non-intervention was a boon for the fascists.
A significant difference with Ukraine of course, is that it was an internal conflict, limited by a country exhausted at its end and with no desire to fight beyond its borders, taking no part in the Second World War.
Putin’s Russia is expansionist, powerful, supported by allies in China and Iran and consumed by a hatred of NATO and the West.The ‘rights and wrongs’ are not complex here. It’s a war of aggression. I think we know enough to see that non-intervention will not end anything. War will come to us if we sit on our hands over Ukraine.
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