No doubt we’re all watching the news coming from Ukraine with absolute horror. Open warfare has returned to Europe for the first time in seventy years, with one country illegally occupying another. The way in which Putin is behaving is stomach-churning, and you would have hoped humanity would have outgrown this sort of despotic crap years ago. Indeed, organisations like the European Union were created precisely to prevent things like this from happening.

Yet that is why Putin made sure Brexit happened, or at least was a major player in underpinning the Leave campaign. He knew he would need to weaken the EU before he could proceed with his imperialistic plans, and tricking the UK into leaving was a major part of that. Others have explained the links between Farage and Putin better than I can; but now that I come to think about it, the conspiracist bullshit Lyn used to listen to around the time of the Brexit Referendum was clearly payed for by Russia. They used to spout all sorts of nonsense about how nasty and oppressive the EU was, but also about how the so-called mainstream media had brainwashed us all into hating Russia, as if it was some kind of benevolent victim rather than an imperialist dictatorship. The emphasis these ‘theorists’ put on Russia’s supposed victimisation combined with how uncritical they were of Russia made the link undeniable.

I don’t know how widespread these nutcases were listened to, but they were obviously being funded by Russia. If they could catch the attention of someone like Lyn, who knows who else was listening to them; and who knows what impact they had on the result of the 2016 referendum? Might other ‘influencers’, such as journalists, also have been in Russia’s pay too? If I’m right, a lot of quite naive people were tricked into voting for something manifestly against their best interests, by people in the pay of an imperial dictatorship. After all, Putin seems very fond of using dubious referendae to get his way: maybe what just happened in Eastern Ukraine should ring a few alarm bells here in the UK. Brexit weakened the EU, opening the door, one way or another, to the madness we’re now witnessing.