I'm old enough to remember Ukraine before February 2022. Before the great PR makeover. Before billions in British public money started flowing. Before the swastikas were quietly airbrushed out of the picture and yesterday's neo-Nazi problem became today's inconvenient history. Back in January 2015, Ross Kemp travelled to Ukraine for his Extreme World documentary series, investigating the rise of the far right and the Azov Battalion, including its neo-Nazi elements and symbolism. This was British mainstream television, not Russian propaganda. Funny how quickly history gets rewritten when the geopolitical interests change and the public chequebook comes out. Of course, Ukraine's corruption, extremist movements and internal divisions didn't magically disappear in February 2022. But suddenly, mentioning what British journalists had openly reported for years was enough to get you branded a Kremlin sympathiser. Well, here's Ross Kemp reporting from Ukraine in 2015, long before the political rebranding. No Russian bots. No Kremlin script. Just the history they would rather you didn't remember.

They've got themselves in too deep. Brussels and the UK have effectively picked up an American proxy war, without a credible exit strategy and with a financial commitment that keeps growing. They gambled on a war economy to inflate GDP, apparently forgetting that you can't build industrial prosperity on missiles and military contracts while starving your factories of affordable energy. Industry runs on gas, oil and electricity, not grand speeches about defeating Russia. They've traded affordable energy and industrial competitiveness for a rearmament programme that may flatter GDP figures but won't rebuild Europe's productive economy. Washington can scale back its involvement, but Europe's leaders have tied themselves to a war they cannot guarantee will be won, a peace settlement they cannot dictate and a bill they have no clear means of settling. It's one thing to inherit Washington's war. It's quite another to discover you're expected to bankroll it indefinitely. Ursula von der Leyen has confirmed that Ukraine faces a further €70 billion funding shortfall in 2027, on top of the €45 billion already earmarked for that year under the EU's €90 billion support package. That's a staggering €115 billion in existing commitments and additional funding requirements for a single year. Brussels is now urgently looking for other countries to help plug the gap, with no firm agreement on where the extra money will come from. And here's the rather inconvenient detail. The existing €90 billion package is being financed through EU borrowing, with Ukraine's repayment obligations tied to future Russian war reparations. Reparations that nobody can guarantee will ever materialise. Ukraine faces a serious financial crisis unless further funding is secured, while European governments are already struggling with debt, weak growth and mounting pressure on their own public finances. Nobody can credibly predict that Ukraine or the EU will go bankrupt in 2027 or 2028. But the financial risks are growing, and the political question is becoming harder to avoid. How many more billions can Brussels borrow to finance a war with no agreed end date, while gambling on a military victory that is far from guaranteed and reparations Russia has shown no willingness to pay? The entire repayment arrangement rests on assumptions, not guarantees. It presumes that Russia can eventually be compelled to pay compensation, whether through a Ukrainian victory or some future peace settlement. Neither outcome is assured, and Moscow has given no indication that it would voluntarily accept such terms. And we're now witnessing something dangerously familiar. This is what happens when you get in so deep that pulling out becomes politically and financially unthinkable. Every additional billion makes it harder to admit the original assumptions may have been wrong. So the money keeps flowing, not necessarily because anyone can demonstrate a successful outcome, but because too much has already been committed to contemplate failure. It's the same "too big to fail" mentality that helped fuel the financial recklessness preceding the 2008 crash. Banks took enormous risks, convinced that the consequences of failure were so catastrophic that governments would ultimately have to rescue them. When the reckoning came, the public picked up the bill. Now consider what happens if this war ends without a Ukrainian victory, Russia refuses to pay and the reparations Brussels has effectively banked on never materialise. The debt doesn't magically disappear. Someone still has to honour those financial commitments. And once again, the danger is that European taxpayers and the public will be left carrying the financial consequences of decisions they had little say in making. The most dangerous point in any financial gamble is when those responsible become more afraid of admitting failure than of losing even more money. Ukraine deserves peace... they don't deserve to be used to enrich the EU through arms deals and dodgy deals...