It’s time to let Ukraine join Nato

The young amputee had a question. We were sitting once again in the rehab centre in Kyiv, and I was looking at the same sort of injuries I saw last year: the missing limbs, the cranial scars, the withered hands and feet that no longer obeyed their owners’ commands.

The difference was that Vladimir Putin’s carnage had been inflicted on a new group of Ukrainians – noticeably younger than last year’s victims, and now including a woman. Once again, I shook their hands (where possible) and put my arms around them, and did my best to be reassuring to all, including the young man on the bed, who had lost his left leg up to the hip. ‘When are you going to let us use the Storm Shadow?’ he asked – amid a general murmur of agreement.

I was positive in my response, or cautiously positive, because it so happened that on that very day the UK delegation had arrived in Washington. If the briefings to the media were accurate, this was perhaps the moment of breakthrough, when the Americans and the British were about to announce that the poor Ukrainians would be able to defend themselves properly against Putin’s glide bombs. We would jointly lift our technological reserve and allow them to use the weapons they already possessed – Storm Shadow and Scalp-EG, its French equivalent, and the American ATACMS systems – in the way they were supposed to work.

I was confident that these permissions would be forthcoming because I could not imagine why else the UK would have bothered to stage the meeting. Why otherwise did Sir Keir Starmer go to the White House, togged up in his Waheed Alli-funded suit and specs? What on earth was Sue Gray doing there? Enforcing the rules on ‘propriety and ethics’? Huh.

Now the US-UK talks have apparently ended in failure – at least for the present.