Getting Away with Murder.

Following the discovery of mass graves in Ukraine, along with other evidence of atrocities, Boris Johnson has said that ‘those responsible must be brought to account.’ This is typical of the empty rhetoric to which politicians are routinely given.

Let us accept for the sake of argument that the received presumption is accurate, and that Russian troops are guilty of committing wanton acts of murder against civilians. The chances of individual soldiers being ‘brought to account’ are effectively nil. So if Johnson is being serious here, who does he consider to be ‘those responsible’?

The fact is that soldiers are necessarily conditioned, both constructively and by dint of circumstances, to have a different perception of right and wrong, and even the value of life itself, to that held by civilians. Such has always been the case to some extent or other. Ergo, anyone who starts a war without impeccably justifiable reasons is de facto a murderer. And we all know who that is in the case of Ukraine.

So what are the chances of Mr Putin being successfully arraigned on a charge of war crimes? Again, virtually nil. There have already been calls for Mr P to be subjected to a Nuremburg-style trial, but this isn’t 1945 when Germany was held in the grip of the Allies and the Nazis could be rounded up to end their days on mass gallows. Nobody is going to invade and crush Russia unless Putin crosses a line and starts WWIII, which isn’t very likely. So unless the great dictator goes completely mad, the person responsible for mass graves and other atrocities will almost certainly get away with it. And that, it seems to me, is that.

(And while I’m on this topic, I have to say that I regard both Tony Blair and GW Bush as also being guilty of mass murder, since the civilian death toll in the 2003 Iraq war was immeasurably higher than that in Ukraine. They both got away with it, and now live a prosperous peace far from the madding crowd.)