Three British former ambassadors take very different views of the war in Ukraine.

Here Sir Andrew Wood former ambassador to Moscow, two days ago, Peter Ford formerly our man in Damascus here on 26 February, when he and everyone expected Putin to seize Kiev quickly, and Craig Murray, formerly our man in Tashkent here.

Here is Charles Moore today and he is right.

"Hitler took 35 days to conquer Poland. It has already taken Vladimir Putin more than twice as long not to conquer Ukraine. Actually, he has done worse: he started trying eight years ago when he annexed Crimea, and still hasn’t managed it. Even Putin’s Belarus puppet, Alexander Lukashenko, publicly noticed this week that the war has “dragged on”. Monday’s annual Victory Parade in Red Square will be a strange occasion. The 1945 victory commemorated contrasts uncomfortably with semi-defeat in 2022.

"Putin has some achievements to his name, however. He broke the UN Charter by starting a war without the justification of self-defence. Then he violated the three key principles of “customary” international law – “distinction” (meaning between combatants and civilians, only the former being targetable), “necessity” and “proportion”.

"…These acts break the laws of war and all moral norms. So does the parading of prisoners on television. So do torture, rape and murder, all of which are now well attested in places like Bucha. Ukraine NOW, the Kyiv government feed on Telegram, posted on Thursday an alleged telephone intercept of a named Russian soldier boasting to his mother how he had tortured “khokhols” (the Russian slang for Ukrainians, like saying “turnip-heads” in England). He describes in detail what the prisoners have suffered. Both he and she laugh. It is horrifying to hear mother and son speaking about acts we would describe as “unspeakable”. Of course, the recording might be fake, but there is good reason to think that Russian torture is real, widespread and officially sanctioned."

However the parallel that is close is not to Hitler's invasion of Poland in September 1939 but to his ally Stalin's invasion of Finland in November 1939, that went badly wrong. It did however end in a victory for Stalin after much hard fighting but not the conquest of the country that he might have intended when he began the war.

It led to the Finns attacking the USSR as German ally. It all ended in Finland becoming neutral, democratic and prosperous.