Observations

Never before has the Black Sea so grotesquely deserved its name. For Putin to order his naval forces to launch random missile strikes on Ukraine - and in this case Odesa - killing many including 3 month old Kira, her mother Valeria, and her grandmother, is an act of almost unspeakable barbarity. This is not an isolated incident but it brings home the tragic reality of what has been taking place in Europe in the last two months.

The United Kingdom has led from the front ever since Putin invaded the Ukrainian area of Crimea in 2014, training Ukraine’s military and providing weapons. Germany, by contrast, has been very late on the scene.

The EU's powerhouse is sorely lacking in power

Even when Olaf Scholz finally decided to allow military supplies to be sent to Ukraine, it transpired that within weeks these had to be stopped because the Bundeswehr (German military) was running out of weapons.

The German Chancellor’s next action was to say that Ukraine could buy weapons from German arms manufacturers direct. Now it seems that heavy weaponry such as mobile howitzers are excluded from that list.

Faced with increasingly strident criticism from other EU countries and even from his own people, it is surely inevitable that the Chancellor of the EU’s leading country will have to retreat yet again.

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