The Ukraine war, from its inception, has been a curious mixture of the transparent and the obscure.
When Vladimir Putin ordered his troops to cross the Ukrainian frontier on 24 February 2022, after eight years of low-grade conflict between his proxies in Donetsk and the Ukrainian army, he made himself an outlaw in the eyes of the world community by breaching international law.
During the phoney war between 2014 and 2022 there were various interpretations of the rights and wrongs of the conflict among international commentators, but any ambiguity ended when Putin launched a war of aggression. He further clarified the situation by attempting to march on Kyiv, with the declared aim of regime change and, ludicrously, “de-Nazification” of the government led by Volodymyr Zelensky, who happens to be Jewish.