By Declan Carey
RUSSIA’S military incursions into Ukraine is a war against freedom itself.
Vladimir Putin gave a speech hours before Russian troops marched into Donetsk and Luhansk with a deranged narrative claiming Ukraine should not exist as a country.
As he did so, I thought of the thousands of innocent Ukranians who have already been killed by Russian actions, and the many more in towns and cities across the country wondering what this all means for them.
Over a million people have been displaced since 2014, but that doesn’t matter to Putin, because a free and democratic Ukraine is the thing he fears the most and what happens next could be even worse.
Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, can be reached in less than 200 kilometres by the Russian soldiers in Belarus.
There are also soldiers positioned in Crimea, Ukrainian territory which is occupied by Russia, and Transnistria, a Russian-backed breakaway state in Moldova.
The invasion is dangerously close to becoming much larger and more aggressive in scale, and that will surely lead to more lives on both sides being lost.
Extremely harsh sanctions are required now from across the international community to stop the Russian war machine in its tracks before more damage is done.
Britain’s sanctions against Russia, which include freezing the assets of Russian banks and three Russian billionaires being banned from entering the UK, don’t go far enough.
The strategy will be, of course, to have a series of harder sanctions ready to be put in place if the invasion escalates.
Today however, Russian Parliament approved the use of its armed forces abroad, heavily implicating that this is just the first step of a plan to attack the rest of Ukraine.
Polls show the majority of Ukranians back their country joining NATO, and Russia should not have any say on that.
Anything less will mean a small part of freedom will have died in Europe, in one of the biggest nation’s in the continent which has known nothing but bloodshed from Russia.
Ukranians have fought and died for their freedom and the world should support them against Russian aggression.
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