The correct line reinforced by the Graun editor

None of this recent wobbling about Brexit, the EU and the war in Ukraine (see the post below) for the Graun today: 

The Guardian view on Boris Johnson in Brussels: drop the Brexit rhetoric 

It is true that Brexit doesn’t prevent the prime minister taking an active role in supporting Ukraine against Kremlin aggression. British military hardware is appreciated on the frontline. Mr Johnson can be in the loop of western diplomacy without a seat at the EU table. He will also be attending a Nato summit in Brussels on Thursday...[However]the US president recognises something that Mr Johnson denies – the European Council is a place where decisions of consequence are made. The prime minister would serve his country’s interests better from inside the room.

[Still annoyed at the silly analogy] Mr Johnson made a speech last week drawing a grotesque comparison between Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion and the UK’s decision to leave the EU. Both reflected a common appetite for liberty, the prime minister said, mining a depth of crass cynicism to which even staunch critics did not think him capable of sinking.

[Milking gallant little Ukraine's stand]The trivialising thrust of the analogy was made all the more insulting in the context of Ukrainian ambitions to join the very European project that Mr Johnson casts as an imperial aggressor. For Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the EU and Nato are twin pillars of a democratic European order that stands in opposition to the worldview advanced by Vladimir Putin, where the rule of law is meaningless, might is right and borders are erased at a dictator’s whim.

Mr Putin...sees undermining EU solidarity as instrumental to the goal of sabotaging western interests. That is why he backed Brexit.

[So  what exactly is at stake?]EU solidarity, resolute at the start of the war, is under strain. There are differences over the shape and pace of new sanctions against Moscow and how to meet the cost. The Baltic states and Poland, having more experience of Kremlin hostility, are hawkish in wanting to maximise pressure on Moscow. Germany resists embargos that might weaken European economies by limiting energy supplies and stoking prices. This week’s summit is likely to produce only conditional statements of tougher intent, not tougher action, disappointing those who would push harder against the Putin regime.

That is a debate in which Britain would like a say. As one of the continent’s economic and military powers, it also has sway. Mr Johnson can be influential from outside a Brussels summit, but he has forfeited a say over the agenda. He has no one but himself to blame if decisions are made that he would have opposed had he been at the table.

So let me get this right...we should stay in the EU to have had a say over the agenda? Our single vote would have been set against the other participants producing 'only conditional statements of tougher intent'?  Would that actually do anything for the titanic struggle for 'democracy'? Isn't Johnson already actually doing more to assist Ukraine? Did Brexit do any more to 'weaken' the EU than the divisions between Germany and the Baltic States do already, or that Merkel's policy of economic interdependence did?

How much did that annoying analogy do to blind the Graun! Incidentally, I am grateful to the Facebook poster who pointed out that not long ago, gallant little Ukraine was condemned as 'the most corrupt nation in Europe' (Graun  6 Feb 2015)  and 'having a 'neo-Nazi problem' (Reuters March 16 2018) It must be said,of course, that this reported the case before the election of Zelensky.