No-fly zones won’t work, but what about aid to Ukraine?

Vladimir Putin’s forces are encircling the cities of Kharkiv, Kherson and Mariupol, and a 40 mile-long convoy of Russian armoured vehicles is north of Kiev on the seventh day of fighting in Ukraine. The coming days are likely to see greater barbarity from the Russian President after he failed to get his way in the first few days of the invasion. Those days are also likely to stretch into weeks as Putin lays siege to these cities until they are his.

So far the political debate in the West has been dominated by a noisy argument about a no-fly zone: something all leaders have repeatedly ruled out on the grounds that it would lead to direct combat between Nato and Russia. The no-fly-zone idea hadn’t just come from British MPs like Tobias Ellwood: it was raised at the Prime Minister’s press conference in Poland by a Ukrainian journalist and activist yesterday, and is something that western reporters are relaying back from people in the cities under attack today.