The US aims to help Ukraine defend itself, but does not enable or support strikes with its weapons on Russian territory. US Ambassador Bridget Brink said this during a round table with Isobel Coleman, the deputy head of USAID, who is visiting Kyiv.
For some politicians, racists are despicable until you start losing voters to them:
"Victory in the fight for trust with the economy was critical.
Another was countering the UK Independence Party (Ukip). It is easy to forget what a potent political force Nigel Farage's band of rightwing Eurosceptic insurgents then was - and what a threat it posed to the Conservatives. Its blend of status quo-bashing, saying the 'unsayable' and tapping into concerns on immigration and crime was effective against a Tory Party that had been pushed towards the centre ground. In 2014, Ukip came top in the European Parliament elections, picking up one in every four votes. They were flipping Tory MPs too, with Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless defecting to Ukip and winning the subsequent by-elections. Ukip would go on to get almost four million votes at the 2015 election, more than 12 per cent of the total, coming second in 120 seats, but getting across the line in just one: Carswell's Clacton. Farage called the result, a reflection of the old first-past-the-post rules that the Lib Dems had tried to ditch, 'very, very painful'. 'Never in the history of British politics has anybody got more votes with fewer seats,' Farage said in an interview.
Back in 2006, Cameron had dubbed Ukip supporters a bunch of fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists'. Come 2015, he was offering an olive branch to tempt 'my little purple friends' back to the blue side. The major move here came in January 2013 with the promise of an in/out referendum on European Union membership - the starting gun on the race that would end with Brexit. The threat was less that of Ukip winning vast numbers of seats than of denying Tory victories by forcing down their vote totals, allowing another party to sneak in at the top. Isaac Levido, another Australian political strategist who is often seen as Crosby's protégé and who would lead Johnson's winning 2019 election campaign, was inside the Tory tent for 2015 and acknowledged the danger. 'Ukip were an existential threat to us getting into a majority government, Levido said. "They only needed to perform marginally better in a handful of seats and we wouldn't have won a majority?"