Alex Phillips: We really need to talk about the migrant crisis

Hindsight is a marvellous thing. In retrospect when we connect up the dots, strategies become apparent, and pitfalls appear less inevitable. Auditing the news headlines today, you are left to wonder whether many headlines have a common denominator. A Russian one. Called Vlad.

First Cop26 became Flop26 after feckless disregard from Russia who probably consider the intercontinental conflab as Western hostility against Soviet strength. After all, the Kremlin has allegedly been playing tombola with gas prices knowing Germany is desperate for a new energy supply while their plans for a new pipeline with Moscow - dodging Ukraine - are in the air, while Russia wants to penalise both Kiev and the EU for flirting.

Then, Russian neighbour and regional patsy Belarus is reportedly helping to ship thousands of migrants to the EU’s frontiers of Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, supposedly plying them with vodka and allegedly planning to tool up the hordes of men straining at the barbed wire fences to clash with the Polish troops now assembled there, as the desperate migrants promised transit to Europe perish from starvation and cold. Reports of lasers and strobes being used to boggle the Polish troops also suggest sinister intervention is already afoot.

Now, we are being told that UK secret service forces are being deployed to Ukraine where 100,000 Russian troops are yet again assembling on the border as well as conducting joint military operations with ever faithful bag carrier Belarus, who enjoyed the spectacle of Russian nuclear war planes buzzing over their airspace. Having snatched Crimea with barely a slap on the wrist by the international community, Putin seems emboldened to not only continue his geopolitical micro aggressions but escalate them into outright invasion.

Meanwhile migrants continue to flood across the English Channel, causing Boris Johnson’s poll ratings to crumble. A neat way to serve a hefty blow to a Britain beginning to strut its stuff on the world stage with G7 and climate summits, flush with Brexity ballsiness, deigning to tell Vlad to step away from the coal. Those who claim Russia meddled with Brexit contradict other Moscow analysts that believe the Kremlin don’t want an assertive Britain reconnecting with America and the Anglosphere, making submarines and winning vaccine races and choreographing global affairs free from Brussels’ bureaucratic blundering and notorious ineptitude.

But trying to second guess which way the mercurial Putin might veer is a game of chess, as Russia is now positioning to be able to resolve the confected border crisis, no doubt at a price. A hybrid game of disinformation and destabilisation and one against which we must be on guard, according to Chief of the Defence Staff General Sir Nick Carter who predicts trouble ahead. What is going on?

We really need to talk about the migrant crisis.