Some thoughts that I published exactly a year ago on WordPress:
Has Ukraine joined the Commonwealth to participate in the Games, with its citizens either minimum double 'vaccinated' or providing a negative 'Covid' test? You might think so when its flag is being flown at Leamington Spa Town Hall above a Commonwealth Games banner, though perhaps those 'Covid' rules don't apply at present. Whilst the Union Flag is to the left, to the right when I took this photo was a flag for Armed Forces Day declaring 'Show Your Support'. The messaging should be obvious, Ukraine is to be considered as part of the 'West' and British troops could be officially engaged in NATO's currently proxy war against Russia. Those of us of genuinely progressive outlook and old enough to remember the Cold War, will be horrified at the prospect. Of course, ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union and with it the Warsaw Pact, NATO has sought to expand ever eastward onto Russia's borders.
Concomitant with this, the European Union has been playing the same game, by its eastward expansion into three former Soviet Republics, the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; and six former members of the Warsaw Pact, Poland, the former Czechoslovakia (now Czechia and Slovakia), Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, not forgetting the former East Germany. That each of those countries was run on a totalitarian basis does not mean that they should have become absorbed into the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation or a European Union, that has itself become increasingly centralised since it evolved from the European Economic Community and authoritarian, with its recent imposition of the Digital COVID Certificate for travel. Those countries could have remained outside of NATO and the EU, in the latter case developing their own separate customs unions and free-trading areas.
This coming together of the EU's expansionist aims with those of NATO was foreseen by the Green Party in its European Election Manifesto 1999, when it kept a healthy, sceptical detachment from the EU's establishment rather than becoming embraced by it. In that manifesto, the Green Party explicitly stated that 'Green MEP's have consistently protected the rights of neutral states to remain neutral and to avoid being sucked into Western military structures' and declared that the 'EU must not become the European pillar of NATO'. But that is precisely what has happened in Ukraine, with its democratically elected government having been toppled in 2014. Hence in the UK, flying the Ukrainian flag has become a substitute for or a complement to flying the EU one, appealing to those who are too young to remember when there was a real risk of a nuclear war between East and West. The Temperance Bar in Leamington Spa, which has a vegan kitchen, is an example of one local business that has been flying the Ukrainian flag. I wonder if its proprietors and predominantly Generation Z clientele understand that the display is part of the imperialist Great Game?
Ukraine is not yet officially part of the the West, though both NATO and the EU harbour territorial aspirations on it. On a more local level, Warwickshire is due to be absorbed without any democratic vote into Greater Birmingham, the West Midlands Combined Authority. This is another stage of the plan to divide England up into ‘regions’, over-riding representation at local level.