Friday 18 July 2014

The world, and Europe in particular, needs to tell Putin they've had enough.

Nearly four years ago, after a relatively short hop over the East and the South China seas from Kansai International, and a far-too-long lay over in Kuala Lumpur, I sat on a Malaysia Airlines flight and watched the desert shores of the Caspian Sea slip by some ten thousand metres below, and the plane then headed on over Rostov-on-Don and Eastern Ukraine. That was four years ago, but it could just as easily have happened yesterday, and I - and anyone else who regularly flies between Europe and Asia - could just as easily have been on flight MH17 as it was blasted out of a sky by a missile that was almost certainly fired by either the Russian military or their proxies within Ukraine.

Some people - Tom Friedman being a shining example - are given to talking about the interconnected-ness of the modern world, and how the shared interests this should generate should act to limit conflicts as the damage will no longer be limited to a single area of the globe. If this is at all true then the citizens of all the countries affected by the conflict, particularly those closest to it in Europe, need to finally take a stand against Putin's incursion into the Ukraine, an incursion which has now resulted in the deaths of hundreds of perfectly innocent people. They need to do it now, and they need to do it in a definite and un-ignorable way.

That's why the very first thing that needs to be questioned is whether it is appropriate to be hosting the 2018 World Cup in Russia, and whether the teams of countries whose citizens have been killed by Putin's proxies should really be planning to attend a sports tournament that will be a major PR coup for the Putin government.