More missiles more war more killing in Ukraine

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that continuing to arm Ukraine to fight off Russia is the right and moral thing to do. But when I see Zelensky doing his rounds to drum up pledges for more and more missiles and tanks and ammunition and artillery, the nagging feeling is that the mass of weapons provided by the West will still not actually force Putin to withdraw his invasion troops. In fact the more Ukraine is armed the more likely Putin will stay the course because to withdraw now would be to accept utter humiliation in the eyes of the world. For a leader like Putin who is relentless in his pursuit of a revived Soviet Union, giving up is not part of his make-up. So the war will go on and on and the Russians will suffer defeats and the casualty toll will rise and rise but there will be no orders from the Kremlin to pull back. Under Putin's doctrine, however many setbacks there may be, the goal has to stay the same. The troops will remain until the job is done. If not the original job as imagined by Putin but enough of a job for the Russian leader to claim Mission Accomplished (he should have a chat with George W Bush about that!). So Zelensky has done well on his latest round-European-capitals trip with promises of a whole bunch of warfghting stuff to keep the battle going. But the more Zelensky fights back, the more Putin will reply with destruction and death. That is guaranteed.

Zelensky is a great diplomat

Since becoming Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky has grown a reputation as a great war leader, almost of Churchillian quality. He certainly knows how to make an eloquent, inspirational speech to stir his compatriots to fight the Russians with courage and determination and belief in their cause. But Zelensky has also become one of the world's great diplomats. He wants to see everyone and everyone wants to see him. Just in a few days he has been to see the Italian prime minister Georgia Meloni and the Pope, the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and then Emmanuel Macron, the French president. It's whistlestop diplomacy to get more arms and other help from Europe for his aim to defeat the Russian invasion force. He is so effective that no one says no to him. Scholz promised 2.7 billion euros in arms. He is without doubt one of the most effective politicians and diplomats on the planet right now. And he does it all with humility. It still seems extraordinary how far he has come since being elected president with very little experience and no knowledge of fighting a major war. He deserves to achieve the goal he is after: the end of the war with all Russian troops driven back to their garrisons in Russia.

Biden can't win the migration crisis

Tens of thousands of would-be American citizen migrants are queuing up at the Mexican/US border at El Paso, hoping to be allowed in following the end of the Covid keep-out rules. This is a crisis from which Joe Biden is not going to come out well. He can't win. No president can win this one. Trump would probably just spend billions more building his wall but that wouldn't do the trick either. These are people who have already walked or been driven hundreds/thousands of miles from their countries of origin to seek a better life in America. They are not going to give up. And they obviously think the best way is to queue up legitimately at the El Paso gates because Biden has legislation in play which bans their entry if they try to enter illegally. Like climbing the wall in the dead of night. The photos of migrants neck-deep in the river to reach the other side where they face armed border patrol officers behind barbed wire fencing underline the challenge confronting the Biden administration. What can Biden do to make it look as if the United States is still a humanitarian country willing to help those in need but without having an endless stream of people demanding entry between now and the 2024 election. They will all want to get into the US before the election in case Trump wins and slams the door in their faces. This was supposed to be a crisis to be solved by Kamala Harris, the vice president. But she found, like everyone before her, that there wasn't an easy solution. If the migrants are let in to be processed they have to stay in detention centres which then get full to bursting and diseases start to spread and appalling tales of physical abuse emerge. Just like the migrant crisis the UK is facing there is no answer that will satisfy everyone. And one thing we know for sure is that this sort of crisis is going to get worse and worse as more disasters, man-made and natural, occur around the world.

Could Storm Shadow be used to break up the bridge to Crimea?

Now that the British 155-mile-range Storm Shadow cruise missile has been delivered to Ukraine, the longest-range missile supplied by the West so far, what will Zelensky do with it? There is supposedly a deal between Kyiv and London that the missile won't be fired against targets inside Russia. But that doesn't preclude Crimea being in Zelensky's plans for attacking big Russian targets previously immune from strikes. So I think Zelensky will have the Kerch Strait bridge in his sights. The Russian troops stationed in Crimea since the peninsula was annexed by Putin in 2014 depend on the bridge for everything from ammunition supplies to food. It's a prime target that has been hit before but the damage was not fatal. With Storm Shadow at his disposal, Zelensky could put the bridge out of action for months. It would be equivalent to a blockade and would be a massive blow to Putin who is determined to hang onto Crimea. The problem for the Ukrainians will be how to deliver the missile to the target. The missile was developed to be carried by a fighter aircraft. Once launched, it can fly on its own for 155 miles which reduces the threat faced by the weapon-carrying aircraft but there will still be a risk posed by the Russian air defence systems. The Storm Shadow weighs around 2,900 pounds which effectively rules out using the MiG-29 Fulcrum and Sukhoi Su-25 Grach which normally carry bombs weighing no more than 1,100 pounds. The larger Su-27 Flanker and Su-24 Fencer are the most likely aircraft to be fitted with Storm Shadow as they are used to carrying much heavier bomb payloads. Nothing in the missile deal between the UK and Ukraine stipulates that Kyiv is banned from attacking Russian targets in Crimea, as far as I am aware, because it was illegally seized by Noscow. So the Kerch Bridge and Russian troop positions in Crimea are likely to be the prime targets for the new longer-range missile.

Trump's brazen performance on CNN should scare the whole Republican party

Even if the sexual harrassment finding against Donald Trump didn't scare off the majority of senior Republicans, the former president's extraordinarily in-your-face, brazen answers to questions posed by CNN's top interviewer should frighten the life out of them. Can they really continue to support a man who treats every critical question as a joke and then turns it around to berate the journalist for so much as daring to question the accuracy of his bold and oh so familiar claims about the fake election result in 2020. At one point he just dismissed the CNN lady, Kaitlan Collins, as a "nasty person". Trump bullied his way through the interview. It wasn't pleasant. Any Republican watching it must surely have cringed. Could this be a turning point in support for Trump? Could he have overdone it and could he now start losing that support? We can only hope.

Proven sexual abuse accusation won't stop Teflon Don

I can only go on what the jury decided in the civil court case brought against Donald Trump. They decided the former president was liable for what was claimed to have taken place in the changing room of a clothing shop many years ago. It wasn't like a criminal case where he had been convicted and faced a prison sentence but the woman in the case, E Jean Carroll, described what Trump did to her in the changing room and the jury beieved her. Trump said he had never heard of or met Jean Carroll. But, again, the jury backed her, not Trump. But is any of this going to make any difference to Trump's campaign for the White House. Amazingly, cynically, bizarrely, unbelievably it seems it will not make a ha'p'orth of difference. In fact Trump will use what he says is a false accusation to promote his vote-winning slogan that he is the victim of a witchhunt and a fake news campaign to undermine his right to return to the White House as president. Any other politician in the United States of America and it would have been a very different picture. But for Trump every setback is a plus in his view. So he will charge on, building his MAGA following until it swamps everyone. Mitt Romney, one of the few Republicans to speak out and dare say that Trump is not fit to be president has no such following. He is regarded as an outsider in the Republican party. Marco Rubio for heaven's sake, the senator from Miami who has been critical of Trump in the past, has come out in his support. Has he decided Trump is going to beat Biden and therefore, if he wants a job in the Trump administration, he has to go all Trump lovey-dovey? I fear so. Donald Trump is truly Teflon Don.

Putin has nothing to celebrate

Vladimir Putin has a habit these days of looking miserable. He could hardly raise a smile during his very short address in Red Square for the "celebratory" annual May 9 anniversary of the defeat of Fascism in the Second World War. Instead of the vast display of Russian military hardware that normally rolls through the square to demonstrate Russia's superpower status, the Kremlin organisers could only muster a few old bits of armour, headed by a T-34 tank from the Soviet days. Ok, it represented what the Soviets used to help defeat Nazi Germany but it was also a reminder to the rest of the world that huge numbers of more modern Russian tanks have either been destroyed in the war in Ukraine or are stuck in defensive positions in eastern Ukraine waiting for what Kyiv promises will be a major counter-offensive. The parade of Russian firepower in Red Square looked more like the remains of a long-forgotten empire. No wonder Putin lookd so glum. Of course he tried to claim that the war in Ukraine was all the West's fault but surely the majority of Russian people must now be aware that it was Putin's paranoia which led him to authorise the invasion of Ukraine. The T-34 tank may have represented times gone by, but its presence in Red Square also symbolised the state of the Russian army today. Most of the army is in Ukraine but instead of giving Putin the victory which he had hoped to celebrate in Red Square today, they have presented him with the opposite of a resounding triumph - defeat, humiliation and disaster. But I'm sure the Russian president won't see it that way which is why the war will just go on and on.