• IN March Russian-backed TV news channel RT (formerly Russia Today) disappeared from all broadcast platforms in the UK.

During World War II broadcasts of Germany Calling were heard from the aptly named Lord Haw-Haw (William Joyce), delivering doom and gloom to Britain of Allied defeats, sunken shipping, a population starving and scratching around in the rubble of bombed cities.

People who bothered to listen to this propaganda treated it with contempt or as an amusing diversion, since realities on the Home Front and letters from service personnel told a different story.

Few countries have a squeaky-clean history, certainly not Russia in its various reinventions, the UK or USA, or Ukraine.

Hanging on to America’s coat tails and its almost pathological hatred of communism, Britain has been dragged into a conflict embracing, with manic fervour, sanctions, arms supply, Ukrainian refugees and culture, raising president Volodymyr Zelensky to a level of sainthood.

The only relief is of some mature and pragmatic voices resisting his urgings to invoke NATO’s military involvement.

The scenario is driven by juvenile instant gratification whereby desire must be immediately granted.

Amazingly to these people in Washington, Whitehall and one or two of the more excitable European Union leaders, Russia has not caved in and run away after a six-day war, and shows no sign of throwing in the towel.

President Vladimir Putin may be a very nasty man but, so far as we know, he enjoys popular support at home.

But we don’t know because kiddies in the UK department of censorship have decided that British people lack the capacity to evaluate reporting of Russian news, whether propaganda or not.

ALAN WHEELER, NW5