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A fortnight ago Hitchens wrote that his idol Putin would never invade the Ukraine because he’d be insane to do so. Yet Hitchens had it on good authority that the humanoid bandit in the Kremlin was as sane as they come.

Well, he has invaded. Now I’m eagerly awaiting Hitchens’s mea culpa for his unswerving commitment to regurgitating Kremlin propaganda emanating from a madman. Something tells me I’ll have to wait a long time.

Stephen “I-Agree-With-My-Colleague-Peter-Hitchens” Glover is welcome to join the breast-beating, as are all other fools and knaves who have been shilling for Russia’s KGB regime, kissing Putin’s less attractive parts with ever-increasing gusto.

They’ll never wash the brown stuff off their noses, but an apology would be welcome. Instead I’m sure they’ll continue to blame the West in general and Nato in particular for the latest crime committed by Russia’s evil regime.

And here our paths converge: we arrive at the same point, if by different routes. Unlike Putin’s army of Western fools and knaves, I don’t blame the West for being nasty to Putin. I blame it for being too acquiescent, too negligent, too greedy – and yes, too stupid.

Putin’s strength comes from his ability to blackmail the West with his trillions parked in Western banks, his tanks and planes wholly dependent on Western electronics, and his oft-stated resolve to use nuclear weapons, which is unmatched by our vacillating, venal, vacuous governments.

Last year he reiterated that threat of an all-out nuclear holocaust with a quasi-religious dimension: “We as martyrs will go to heaven, and they’ll croak.” I don’t know how many Russians are willing to accompany Putin to the pearly gates. I hope not too many, although the polls show popular support for this crime.

I also hope that the West will offer a proper response to the nuclear threat Putin issued in the early hours of the morning:

“Whoever tries to get in our way, and especially to create threats to our country and our people, ought to know that Russia’s response will be instant, leading to the kind of consequences they have never encountered in their history. We are ready for every eventuality, and all the relevant decisions have been made. I hope I’ll be heard.”

Loud and clear. The ghoulish yahoo in the Kremlin is ready to attack you, me, our families, our cities, our whole life with nuclear weapons. And it’s we, ladies and gentlemen, who have let it come to this.

For everything that powers Putin’s juggernaut has been imported from the West. There isn’t a single Russian-made computer in Russia, nor a single piece of military equipment without Western components.

Russian hydrocarbon production is wholly dependent on Western technologies and equipment. The money to import all that stuff came from the markets offered by the West and the capital obligingly provided by Western financial institutions.

Driven by the Vespasian principle of pecunia non olet, the West allowed Russian gangsters, including Putin himself, to recirculate their ill-gotten trillions through Western havens. London in particular has been turned into a giant laundromat, with a whole industry rising to serve Putin’s loot: banks, brokerages, consultancies, legal firms, security services, trading houses.

Our governments have been infiltrated from top to bottom by Russian spies and gangsters (the two groups have been fused into one). Our top politicians, including those currently active, form a beeline for directorships in Russian energy monopolies, effectively trading influence for bribes.

And our top newspapers hospitably offer their column inches to blatant and mendacious pro-Putin propagandists, such as Hitchens consistently, the late Christopher Booker in the past, now Glover, occasionally Liddle – and I’m only mentioning some of the British hacks.

France too has its fair share of this breed, one of whose specimens, Zemmour, is trying to become president. And Putin proudly and profitably counts among his friends a former chancellor of Germany, a former president of the US, a former prime minister of France, the current leaders of Hungary and Poland – along with a small army of smaller fry.

At the heart of it all lies the cretinous euphoria (Hitchens described it vividly yesterday) over the transfer of power in Russia from the Party to the KGB, sold to the West as glasnost, perestroika and the collapse of communism. Few Western commentators or politicians saw through that ploy, and those who did chose to shut their eyes and rake in the money.

As a result, the West didn’t demand real changes in Russia as a precondition for any aid or technology transfer. The so-called victory in the Cold War wasn’t at all like the victory in the latest hot war. Russia didn’t disarm and, most important, the most sinister organisation in history, the KGB, didn’t disband. Instead it grabbed all power in Russia, becoming the government, not its servant.

The signs were there from the beginning, and they’ve become bigger and clearer with each year of Putin’s rule, with each crime his bandit regime committed. All such signs have been ignored – even yesterday many commentators, including those within the Russian opposition, sneered at the very possibility of a full-scale Russian invasion.

And now the chickens have come to roost: Europe is facing a major war in its second-largest country (to start with); for the first time since 1962 the danger of a nuclear war is real; the aggressive bandit in the Kremlin has been emboldened and encouraged to press on.

All of this has been entirely predictable, and indeed predicted. But voices crying in the wilderness are only ever heard by the birds and the grass.

I’ve been trying to write in the dispassionate manner prized so highly in British journalism. This has proved impossible. I can no longer whisper, other than praying for the Ukraine and her poor people.

Other than that I have to shout: “Are you happy now, bastards?” And, on a different note, “Long live the Ukraine!”

Both gentlemen are Putin’s agents, witting or unwitting, I don’t particularly care which. That distinction is a matter for the courts to decide, either in this world or, more likely, the next.

Trump’s response to Russia’s latest bandit raid is more idiotic and hence, paradoxically, less emetic. He has never bothered to conceal his admiration for Putin personally and his modus operandi in general.

One detects in Trump an envious longing for the same kind of government: dictatorial, uncivilised, unaccountable, brutal, corrupt to the point of being mafioso, contemptuous of any legal restraints.

None of such preferences can be publicly stated in America, but Trump palpably acted in that spirit before, during and after his presidency. He and his acolytes proudly state that his detractors never managed to make an airtight legal case against him, but that’s nothing to be proud of.

Trump’s whole career, specifically his dealings with Russia, has been based on walking the thin line separating immorality from criminality. True, the latter couldn’t be proved beyond reasonable doubt. The former, however, has been blatant throughout Trump’s life. Anyone seeking proof of that should read the small library of recent books on the subject, each lavishly illustrated with photos of Trump hobnobbing with known Russian gangsters.

As president, he did all he could for his friend and role model Vlad, fighting the sanctions imposed by Congress every step of the way, and never once voicing disapproval of Russia’s land grab in Georgia and the Ukraine.

Trump never minded voicing his admiration for Putin, although, when president, he made some effort not to be too obvious. There’s no longer any need for such reticence and Trump let it all hang out in yesterday’s interview.

“This is genius,” he said. “Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine – of Ukraine – Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful.

“How smart is that?” Trump continued. “And he’s gonna go in and be a peacekeeper. That’s the strongest peace force… We could use that on our southern border. That’s the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen. There were more army tanks than I’ve ever seen. They’re gonna keep peace all right.”

I hope his American readers and would-be voters made a mental note of Trump’s intentions should he return to the White House. He must be planning to send American armour to occupy the northern provinces of Mexico. Clearly, no moral or legal restraints need apply. For Trump, replacing morality and legality with brute force is a “wonderful” and “smart” manifestation of genius.

To his credit, Trump spoke from the heart, without letting such cardiophonic self-expression be sullied with subterfuge, spurious arguments and ignorant references to history. All these are amply present in Hitchens’s article on the same subject.

As a minor point, I wish he didn’t shove his credentials down our throats, repeating in practically every piece the mantra he has again intoned today: “I lived in Russia, I knew Russians as friends. I learned to distinguish between what was Russian and what was Communist.”

That would have been an easy distinction for him to draw: Hitchens himself was a communist or damn near until his late thirties, yet he never was a Russian. So the two things were clearly demarcated.

And he never lived in Russia. He spent about a year whipping around Moscow in his “red Volvo” and living in a cossetted enclave he himself describes as “my elite block of flats, which I shared illegally with dozens of hoary old Stalinists, KGB men and Kremlin loyalists.”

Living in Russia means (or certainly did at the time) being on the receiving end of her regime, feeling enslaved, bullied, starved of information and unprotected by any laws, having to go to inordinate lengths just to scrape the kind of living Englishmen only ever see in slums, sharing a single room with three generations of the same family and the bathroom with five families of strangers.

As to Hitchens’s Damascene insight into the difference between Russians and communists, that’s at best platitudinous and at worst wrong. Having spent 15 years in early 19^th century Russia, Joseph de Maistre quipped: “Every people gets the kind of government it deserves.”

That adage doesn’t cover every eventuality, and it would be wrong to derive Bolshevism entirely from Russia’s history and national character (as Richard Pipes does in his books). Yet it would be fatuous to deny that some link exists.

But that’s a minor matter, able to cause only a wince, not full-blown nausea. The onset of emesis comes from Hitchens’s description of his elation at the “collapse of the Soviet Union”. People who both knew and understood Russia better (well, me) reacted differently. I shan’t bother repeating what I wrote a few days ago: http://www.alexanderboot.com/putins-russia-began-in-1953/ but do cast a quick retrospective glance.

Hitchens wasn’t the only member of the large group Lenin ungratefully described as “useful idiots”. Joy and triumphalism were widespread among crepuscular Western ignoramuses, one of whom even declared “the end of history”.

They didn’t realise that Russian communism collapsed not in 1991, but in 1937, when Stalin had every deranged believer in that nonsense shot. Communist jargon was still preserved as the glossocratic yoke on hoi polloi, but Stalin was after recreating and expanding the Russian Empire, not exporting Marxism.

He was proved right in 1941, when Russians refused to die for Bolshevism, preferring instead to surrender to the Nazis in their millions. It took Stalin a couple of months to realise that, but realise it he did.

The Orthodox Church was taken off the mothballs, and Lenin was the only Marxist who lent his name to a military decoration. All the other awards named after people featured imperial heroes of the past: Nevsky, Suvorov, Kutuzov, Ushakov, Nakhimov, Khmelnytsky.

Hitchens can’t be blamed for having gone with the flow, or rather effluvia, of public enthusiasm. He can, however, be blamed for claiming that Putin’s banditry is all the West’s fault.

The first prong in Hitchens’s offensive on “the foolish, arrogant West” is based on its reluctance to spend trillions to drag Russia’s economy out of her self-inflicted ruins. Here he draws a foolhardy parallel between Germany, 1945, and Russia, 1991:

“Had not Marshall Plan aid revived and rebuilt a ruined Western Europe after World War Two? Had Britain and the other occupying powers not vowed to bring democracy, freedom and the rule of law to a prostrate Germany? Was this not a moment for an equally unique act of generosity and far sight?”

Yes, it was – for those with a weak grasp of history. Hitchens is blind to the fundamental difference between post-Nazi Germany and post-Soviet Russia.

The Nazi period of German history ended in the Nuremberg trial and all the subsequent trials of lesser monsters. Hundreds of them were executed, thousands went to prison.

Germany then embarked on a massive de-Nazification campaign, repudiating and repenting her Nazi past. What followed was an economic miracle, only partially produced by Marshall aid. Adenauer and Erhardt eschewed socialism and put faith in free markets and stable currency. Since then Germany has been free and prosperous, if not exactly saintly.

Nothing like that happened in Russia. The Communist Party wasn’t banned and membership in it remained legal (in Germany NSDAP membership was seen as ipso facto criminal). The KGB wasn’t disbanded, it merely changed its name. And all the post-1991 governments have been full of communists and KGB officers organically fused with organised crime.

Now imagine that no Nuremberg trial had taken place in Germany after the war. Neither the NSDAP nor the SS had been disbanded and outlawed. And heading the German government were not Adenauer and Erhardt, but Goering and Bormann.

How willing would the Americans have been to underwrite the rebirth of such a Germany? Not very, would be my guess. So there goes the first prong of Hitchens’s offensive, routed by a simple exercise of reason and knowledge of history (things he calls “anti-Russian hysteria”).

His second prong is repeating Putin’s mendacious propaganda about “the continued expansion of Nato eastwards across Europe. This was by then a more or less openly anti-Russian alliance (who else is it directed against?).”

Since we’ve already established that Hitchens isn’t Russian, one has to assume he doesn’t suffer from the traditional Russian paranoia about their country being encircled by bloodthirsty enemies yearning to do her in. He suffers from other things though, such as a cavalier approach to facts.

The process he refers to wasn’t so much “expansion of Nato eastwards”, but expansion of Russia’s former colonies westwards, towards liberty and civilisation. God knows they had suffered enough at the hands of Russians (not just Soviets) to be suspicious of Russia’s instant conversion to virtue.

Since they understood Russia considerably better than our ex-communist, they naturally sought lasting protection from her imperial designs. Those, they suspected, were only dormant, not nonexistent. And they have been proved right.

So yes, Nato is indeed an anti-Russian alliance, but in what way is it threatening to Russia? Here Hitchens has always repeated the Putin line about the existential menace those handfuls of soldiers present to his country.

This is, putting it mildly, disingenuous. The only things Nato has ever threatened in its past, present or future shape is Russia’s aggressive designs on her former colonies. For, unlike Hitchens, Putin doesn’t even pretend to have welcomed the demise of the Soviet Union. He describes it as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20^th century.”

That century saw two world wars and the rise of two satanic, carnivorous regimes. As a result, more people died violent deaths in the 20^th century than in all the previous centuries of recorded history combined. And yet it’s the collapse of the Soviet Union that Putin sees as an incomparable catastrophe, one he dearly wishes to reverse.

His actions prove that. But his words, especially those uttered about the Ukraine, are uncannily similar to Hitchens’s. To give Hitchens his due, he has agitated against the Ukraine’s independence for years, with laudable consistency.

This is what I wrote in 2014, after another blow Hitchens had struck for Putin’s cause: “No doubt, when the Ukraine is first raped and then murdered, Peter will dance on her grave, his arm tenderly embracing Col. Putin’s waist.”

They should invite Trump to make it a threesome. Harrowing thought, that. Enough to turn me off my food.

Over the past week, Britain has been hit by three consecutive storms, with winds gusting at over 120 mph.

Three people died, property damage is measured in hundreds of millions, thousands of households lost electricity and still haven’t found it. I don’t know where this ranks on the list of natural disasters, but just getting on that list is bad enough.

But, and that’s where the original proverb about silver linings comes in, energy prices actually fell because a quarter of our electricity is produced by wind farms. And gusting gales made their turbines spin like crazy, creating a temporary glut of energy.

As another electrical effect, broad smiles lit up the faces of our carbon-fighters. Didn’t they tell you that wind farms would eventually enable us to go carbon-free? Who needs hydrocarbons and uranium when we have wind?

Quite. There’s a slight snag though. If strong winds give us plenty of energy, the logician in me can’t help feeling that weak or no winds must give us little energy or none at all. And the dialectician in me insists that the gusty thesis must coexist with the windless antithesis to give us the synthesis of cold and dark houses.

Of course it’s always possible to ask God to keep winds blowing and, who knows, he may agree to go along with such supplications. The trouble is that most carbon-fighters are atheists and therefore don’t have an open channel of communications with the deity.

And even the few believers among them may be rebuffed by God. He’ll probably tell them in no uncertain terms that he has already granted the earthlings ample sources of energy. Rather than playing silly buggers with ideologies, they should just get on with extracting energy from the ground.

One has to marvel at the suicidal impulse energising modern governments, emphatically including ours. They have all bought, or rather pretend to have bought, the canard of anthropogenic climate change caused by our producing about three per cent of a trace gas, atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Using that ideological hoax as a lantern lighting up a path to virtue, they are prepared to destroy our economies, leaving us at the mercy of the elements. The cost of going carbon-free is measured in trillions, but the economic debacle, awful though it undoubtedly will be, isn’t the worst part of it.

By denying themselves any chance of becoming self-sufficient in energy, Western governments put themselves at a strategic disadvantage vis-à-vis regimes openly hostile to the West. And such regimes do all they can to nudge the West to the precipice.

Long before global warming became fashionable, and when global cooling was in vogue instead, the West was becoming heavily dependent on Arab oil. Since most Arab states were Soviet clients at the time, the communists had a vested interest in preventing the West from becoming self-sufficient.

Hence the hysterical anti-nuke campaign whipped up, encouraged and largely financed by the KGB. Those of a certain age must remember CND posters of mushroom clouds rising over nuclear power stations, with the credulous public led to believe that explosions were a distinct possibility.

In fact, explosive, weapon-grade U-235 is enriched to about 90 per cent. By contrast, reactor-grade uranium is enriched only to about 2–6 per cent, making an explosion impossible. Other dangers, such as a meltdown, do exist, but technologically advanced countries know how to prevent, or at least contain, them.

That’s why there has never been a fatal accident at a nuclear power station in a civilised country (the Soviet Union, with its Chernobyl, didn’t qualify as such). Thus no one died in the two major such events, one at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island in 1979, the other at Japan’s Fukushima in 2011.

Both were described as disasters by the CND and similar groups. That left people wondering what word they reserved for accidents in which people actually died. Meanwhile, the Arab countries were trying to turn their oil into blackmail weapons, and to a large extent they succeeded. Fast-forward to today, and Russian gas is being used in exactly the same way.  

In standing up to Putin’s aggression, the resolve of each Western country seems to be inversely proportionate to the amount of gas it imports from Russia.

Thus the US (energy self-sufficient) and Britain (only five per cent of our gas comes from Russia) show a greater inclination towards harsh sanctions than do the EU as a whole (60 per cent, going up to 80 within a few years) and specifically Germany (49 per cent and growing) and France (24 per cent).

Since Europe’s addiction to Russian gas is unlikely to disappear, Putin knows he is on a winning wicket. His is a low-risk strategy. When the Germans and the French get cold enough, so will their devotion to collective security.

This emphasises yet again the costs of Europe’s asinine, suicidal energy policy dictated by the Greens and largely funded by the KGB/FSB. The old anti-nuke campaign is ticking along nicely and it’s still producing results. Germany, for example, is shutting down all her nuclear power stations, leaving the country at the mercy of Putin’s gas.

Yet most European countries, especially France and Britain, have practically unlimited reserves of shale gas that can be produced easily enough by hydraulic fracturing (fracking). Hence the Green scare campaign against it, with earthquakes used the same way as the anti-nukers’ mushroom clouds.

This campaign is equally mendacious. In fact, fracking has been going on in hundreds of thousands of wells all over the US (mostly in Texas) for 75 years – with the blessing of the Environmental Protection Agency. Nothing resembling an earthquake has ever been recorded.

In fact, it takes extremely sensitive instruments to register the microseismic activity accompanying fracking. This is similar in strength to tremors produced by wind, groundwater, traffic, erosion, any kind of mining and normal life in general. Each day sees many natural tremors of a magnitude tens of thousands of times greater than anything fracking ever delivers – but facts have no effect on the scare campaign.

A French friend of mine led the legal team fighting the fracking industry’s corner, only to vindicate Napoleon’s adage about God being on the side of the big battalions – or in this case fat wallets. The anti-fracking campaign was financed by the Russians, and no number of billions is too high for them.

A Europe self-sufficient in energy wouldn’t have to rely on sanctions or, God forbid, military action to contain Putin’s Russia. It would find itself in a position of strategic strength – with sizeable economic gains as a side benefit.

Instead European countries are busily competing among themselves to see which one can destroy her economy faster in the name of a pernicious ideology. Britain, especially the present administration, is committed to winning this race, with an impoverished population, strategic frailty and grinning Greens the only prizes on offer.

“Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice, and that shout is resonating through my mind even as we speak (about the Ukraine, what else).

The only obvious development is that Macron and Biden are angling for a joint Nobel Peace Prize, and they may even invite Johnson and Putin to partake. Everything else is open to conjecture.

Trying to come up with a theory explaining all the facts of the on-going Ukrainian brouhaha, I studiously avoid even hints at a possible conspiracy. Alas, when I impose that requirement on myself, I can’t think of any theories whatsoever. All I can do is offer you facts.

Today’s headlines scream of Biden and Putin agreeing “in principle” to hold a summit on the Ukraine. That agreement seems to have been brokered by Manny Macron, who desperately wants to claim the role of a world leader in spite of his obvious limitations.

The reports of that momentous shift fail to mention whether President Zelensky will have even a walk-on part to play in that forthcoming spectacle. One would think he is entitled to at least that, but this horror show may have a different plot.

He was certainly not invited to attend the annual Munich Security Conference that ended yesterday. There 30 presidents and prime ministers, 100 ministers, heads of Nato, the EU and the UN supported by a group of top international experts were mulling over the crisis at the Russo-Ukrainian border.

Kamala Harris graced the assembly with her presence, lending it credibility with her vice-like grip on international relations in general and Eastern Europe in particular. She probably wanted to offer her perspective as a ‘woman of colour’, only then to realise that no chromatic differences exist between the Russians and Ukrainians.

Zelensky was, colloquially speaking, NFI, but he came anyway. To draw a parallel with that other Munich event, he didn’t want to be cast in the Beneš role, watching from the sidelines as Czechoslovakia was being gift-wrapped for Hitler. Zelensky insisted on having a say in the fate of the country he has been elected to lead, and fancy the gall of some people.

Having crashed the party, he shook the distinguished assembly by uttering the N-word. No, not that one. The word was ‘nuclear’, as in the capability renounced by the Ukraine following the 1994 Budapest Memorandum.

Then the Ukraine agreed to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in exchange for the US, Britain and Russia guaranteeing her territorial integrity — a promise broken in 2014. Now Zelensky hinted, not so subtly, that the Ukraine may not keep up her end either, by possibly developing nuclear weapons or, more likely, unveiling one or two devices she might surreptitiously have held back just in case.

The way he spoke suggested that Zelensky is growing into his unlikely role: “ We will defend our land with or without our partners’ support…,” he said.

“We appreciate any help, but everyone must understand that these aren’t charitable contributions that the Ukraine needs to beg for or remind about…

“These are your contributions to the security of Europe and the world, for which the Ukraine has been a reliable shield, holding off one of the world’s largest armies over the past eight years.”

In general, whatever scenario is being played out, Zelensky acts as if he hasn’t read the script. For weeks now he has been saying that Western politicians and media are whipping up the hysteria, claiming that a full-scale invasion is imminent.

Biden in particular puffs up his cheeks, adjusts his footing to make sure no tumbling accident occurs, focuses his eyes on the teleprompter and pretends to be a Mister-Know-All – only succeeding in coming across as a Mister-Know-Bugger-All.

A fortnight ago he said that his unimpeachable intelligence sources were certain that Russian armour would roll on to Kiev on 16 February. That fateful date came and went, and Biden again cited his unerring spy services in moving the date to 20 February, presumably to coincide with the end of either the Munich conference or the Peking Olympics.

Some commentators are opining that this is a devilishly clever strategy. The US publicises accurate intelligence reports as a way of telling Putin: “We’re on to you”. This is supposed to make him squirm and cancel his plans, although it’s not immediately obvious why he should be so docile.

In the meantime, the US embassy was evacuated from Kiev to Lvov, which contributed to the doomsday atmosphere. Sceptical observers point out that the embassy stayed put in 2014, when the Russian invasion of the Ukraine was in full swing, with thousands being killed, all sorts of sophisticated weaponry being fired and civilian airliners being brought down by Russian SAMs.

History buffs even note that the US embassy in Moscow, 1941, was only evacuated when Nazi officers were able to see the dreamy spires of the Kremlin through their field glasses. Why such a hasty flight now?

After all, even assuming that the Russians are planning to take Kiev, surely that would take days, rather than hours. Plenty of time for the Americans to move out, one would think.

Biden has graciously agreed to have a chinwag with Putin, but only if Russia doesn’t invade. He thereby played the popular grammatical trick of implying that such an invasion hasn’t yet taken place. This is either perfidious or ignorant or stupid, take your pick.

The Russian invasion of the Ukraine happened eight years ago, and war has been raging uninterrupted ever since. Over 14,000 Ukrainians have been killed, along with some 4,000 Russians, and they haven’t fallen victim to traffic accidents.

However, Manny’s initiative and, so far, Biden’s and Putin’s acquiescence suggest that the Drang nach Kiev is being put off yet again. The proposed summit will take days, possibly weeks, to organise, and meanwhile those Russian tanks will have to be revving up their engines without putting the gear stick into Drive.

My reluctance to indulge in conspiracy theories notwithstanding, the aspiring analyst in me has to look for some explanation of these facts. Applying the ancient cui bono principle, I can’t help noticing that all three parties, Joe, Manny and Vlad, stand to gain much and lose nothing by maintaining the border tension for months without a major escalation.

Both Macron and Biden have elections coming up this year, presidential in France, congressional in the US. Anybody familiar with the mentality of modern politicians will know that these events overshadow everything else in their minds.

So suppose the summit takes place and a ‘diplomatic solution’ is found. Biden certainly, Macron probably and Johnson possibly will mount their white steeds and ride in as some kind of knights errant whose gallantry has saved the world from a major war.

The Nobel Committee will start arguing how many ways the Peace Prize could be split, and the politicians involved will win a secure place in history – along with the hearts of their voters that aren’t at the moment glowing with affection.

Putin too will have a claim to his share of the Nobel spoils, while achieving his objectives without too many KIA notices reaching Russian families. He’ll get his hands on the garrotte slowly throttling the Ukraine.

When the peace parties have claimed a resounding victory, it will be churlish for the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ and Manny to support the Ukraine. God forbid Vlad changes his mind and decides to march anyway – especially if that comes before the Nobel Committee has voted.

The only assured loser will be the Ukraine, left to her own devices in a state of virtual isolation, with Putin clogging her energy arteries and the West starving her of investments. Before long, Putin will achieve his goals of grafting his bandit bailiwicks of Donetsk and Lugansk onto the Ukraine’s body politic.

These cancerous cells won’t take long to destroy the host organism, making armoured thrusts unnecessary. The Ukraine may still be allowed to retain her nominal independence, but it will be the independence of, say, Czechoslovakia, c. 1960.

Such is my attempt at rational analysis, undertaken in full realisation that ratio may not apply to the situation in hand. One thing for sure: the Nobel spirit is in the air.     

P.S. Speaking of the Peking Olympics, a Finnish cross-country skier, Remi Lindholm, suffered a frozen penis during the 50km race. The reports don’t state whether the athlete was male or female, which, considering that his Christian name could be either, is a regrettable omission, and one out of touch with our times.

We can, as Lenin liked to say, and therefore must. Our population is four times greater, we have nuclear weapons, the Dutch don’t, let’s march.

“But why must we?” I hear you say. Do I detect doubt? Then wait till you’ve heard this.

During the Nazi occupation, 20,000 young Dutchmen enlisted in the Waffen-SS. Per capita, that was more than in any other country. Do I need to tell you what cause the Waffen-SS served?

Also, Many Dutchmen collaborated with the Nazis even without donning that cute Hugo Boss uniform. It was a Dutch snitch who betrayed Anne Frank, and Dutch policemen who arrested her. Did you know that 75 per cent of Dutch Jews were murdered by the Nazis and their local stooges?

And do you know that even some of today’s Dutchmen are neo-Nazis? They even have their own party, the Dutch People’s Union, that stands in local and national elections. QED. Let’s send what’s left of the Royal Navy to the Hook of Holland.

Every fact I have mentioned is true, but the conclusion is hardly logical, is it? Yet that’s precisely the logic Peter Hitchens co-opts in defence of Putin’s aggression against the Ukraine.

According to him, those who oppose massive violence in the middle of Europe spread falsehoods, such as “the ridiculous cartoon idea that Russia is like Mordor in Lord Of The Rings, an utterly evil country ruled by a Dark Monster. And that Ukraine, its current enemy, is by contrast a shining Utopia, pluckily defending itself against the orc-like hordes of Moscow.”

Do you get it? The trick has been pulled out of the bag; the stage is set for a hey, presto moment. Show that the Ukraine isn’t a “shining utopia”, and a credulous reader will assume that Putin’s Russia isn’t a “Dark Monster” either. Job done, Vlad’s your uncle.

The blatant non sequitur doesn’t deter Hitchens. This isn’t about rhetorical purity. It’s about loyal service to what he once called “the most conservative and Christian country in Europe”.

Just as I did in pretending to call for an invasion of Holland, he cites correct facts. Thus Hitchens spies with his little eye the insignia of a Ukrainian Waffen-SS unit on the shoulders of some of today’s militiamen.

From this he draws the irrefutable conclusion that some Ukrainians (just like some Dutchmen) are neo-Nazis. As such, they are guilty by association of the crimes committed by Ukrainian Nazis during the war:

“This unit is still famous for murdering 200 people in Serbia, for a massacre of 920 Jews in Minsk, now in Belarus, for hanging 99 people in retaliation for French Resistance operations in Tulle… “

All true. Moreover, I too believe in guilt by association. That’s why I can’t help noticing that Col. Putin himself and most of his ministers are proud and unrepentant officers in history’s most murderous organisation, the KGB. It’s ‘are’ rather than ‘were’ because, as Col. Putin once explained, “There’s no such thing as ex-KGB. This is for life.”

If Ukrainian neo-Nazis are retroactively complicit in the crimes mentioned by Hitchens, then Putin and his jolly friends are equally guilty of some 60 million murders committed by their sponsoring organisation. The analogy isn’t quite accurate though.

Those Hitchens correctly identifies as “bigoted racialist thugs” may indeed “have an influence way beyond their numbers in that country”. But they don’t run it. Russia, on the other hand, is run, in effect owned, by direct descendants of the CheKa/OGPU/NKVD/KGB ghouls (I have skipped a few nomenclatures).

Rather than repenting the crimes of their alma mater, they are acting in the same spirit and in the same manner. I shan’t bore you with a list of crimes committed by Putin’s Russia, each either ignored or dismissed as irrelevant by his Western acolytes. Suffice it to say that there are more political prisoners in Russia today than there were in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, which Ronald Reagan accurately called an “evil empire”.

Hitchens’s indictment of the Ukraine would be more valid if he could show the same line of descent there, demonstrating that the neo-Nazis are in control. But he can’t.

Neo-Nazism exists in the Ukraine, especially in the west of the country. But it survives only on the margins of society – witness the fact that Ukrainians elected a Jew as their president. That, indeed their free elections themselves, wouldn’t have happened if admirers of the OUN (the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists) and of its wartime leaders, Messrs Bandera, Melnyk, Shukhevych et al., carried any political weight.

The OUN was indeed a fascist group, committed to creating a Ukraine on the Nazi model. Extermination, or at least expulsion, of Jews was thus a ubiquitous plank in all their draft constitutions, along with the cult of the Leader, state control of the economy, territorial expansion, racial purity and so on. And they acted accordingly.

When the Nazis advanced into the Soviet Union, there was a two-day interregnum in Lvov, the capital of Ukrainian Galicia. The Soviets had already left, but the Nazis hadn’t yet moved in.

The OUN declared its own provisional government and went into action. Its thugs sadistically murdered several thousand Jews and, as you can see in the picture above, they did so joyously, almost playfully.

However, before the Soviets left Lvov, the NKVD had hastily murdered thousands of prisoners held there, including those in remand prisons. The difference today is that the Ukraine is trying to redeem her past sins, while Putin’s KGB gang are perpetuating theirs.

I wonder how far Hitchens is prepared to go in his insistence that we mustn’t “interfere in this very complex problem”. No, of course not. Instead we should sit back and observe with dispassionate neutrality as Putin rapes one former Soviet republic after another, rebuilding the evil empire by evil means.

For the Ukraine isn’t the only former Soviet colony whose denizens collaborated with the Nazis and their Final Solution. All three Baltic republics bear that stigma, as does just about every other Eastern European country, with the partial exception of Hungary. Would Hitchens be using that history to justify Russia’s invasion of all those lands?

Any why stop there? Holland, France, Belgium all had their murderous collaborators – and don’t get me going on the subject of Germany herself. Hitchens would have a hard time explaining why his logic wouldn’t apply there.  

The Ukraine is far from being what the Russians call “white and fluffy”. But she is trying to be our friend, and she is certainly not an implacable enemy of the West.

Putin’s Russia is just that, in word and deed. Hence, even if the Ukraine were the devil incarnate, which she isn’t, we should still treat her as an ally – the way Churchill treated Stalin’s USSR, a country he cordially loathed.

Stalin was an enemy of Britain’s enemy, Nazi Germany. That made him our ex tempore friend. Using the same rudimentary logic, whose friend is Peter Hitchens?

Most acronyms and single-letter identifications are confusing, to me at any rate.

I’m prepared to swing with the times, but within a very narrow amplitude. Thus, reading about a new Gallup poll, I had to look up the definition of Generation Z, something that everyone else seems to know without having to consult dictionaries.

Turns out Gen Z, as it’s affectionately called, describes people reaching adulthood in the second decade of the 21^st century. Having established that, I decided that Gen Z must be minuscule. After all, today’s youngsters stubbornly resist the arrival of adulthood, hanging on to their immature selves for dear life.

However, even though they refuse to embrace adulthood, the poll shows they are more than willing to embrace everything, or rather everybody, else. Compared to ten years ago, the proportion of young Americans who identify as LGBTQ has doubled to 7.1 per cent.

Add to this 6.6 per cent who chose not to divulge that information, and we are left with a mere 86.3 per cent of steadfast straights.

What further confused the issue is that the now-customary plus sign was missing at the end of LGBTQ. That effectively disfranchised such clearly defined identities as pansexual, Two-Spirit and about 70 other possibilities currently recognised as valid.

As a simple boy from downtown Russia, I find it hard to keep track of this taxonomic profusion. However, assuming that the reticent 6.6 per cent would actually be covered by the missing plus sign, almost 14 per cent of young Americans are sexual deviants.

Moreover, they are multiplying rapidly without, one assumes, the benefit of the traditional method of procreation. Why such a rapid increase?

No one has suggested that mankind, specifically its American sub-species, is undergoing wholesale hormonal or cellular changes. Hence one has to leave the domain of physiology and enter one of culture, defined in the broadest possible sense.

The key is in the word I used above, ‘deviant’. No pejorative connotations were implied – I used it in the literal sense, as someone who deviates from the norm. That of course presupposes that a norm exists, which presupposition nowadays seems unsafe.

Gen Z has been indoctrinated in rampant anomie, either rejecting all norms or accepting everything as normal. That amounts to the same thing because, if everything is normal, nothing is.

The term ‘deviance’ has left everyday speech, meaning that aberrant behaviour is no longer stigmatised even socially or culturally, never mind legally. This is a logical development in a civilisation that foolishly replaced equality before God with equality before one another.

When equality becomes the ultimate social, political and cultural virtue, no authority is recognised – unless it has at its disposal coercive means to enforce recognition. And, since no large group of people can survive even physically without discipline, the central state becomes the only entity whose authority is accepted, if only under duress.

Since in the West the state acquires power by mass appeal, it too has to assert its authority by pledging allegiance to universal equality. It therefore has to anathematise all norms, other than those required for its own self-perpetuation.

Thus, if society insists that the sexual alphabet soup belongs on the table side by side with traditional dishes, the state has to follow suit – or even take the lead. The state has to be what modern illiterates call ‘proactive’.

This is achieved by a two-prong offensive. First, the state shields aberrant groups with a wall of protective laws. Second, it monopolises education and imbues it with propaganda of anomie across the board.  

The ball of anomie is bouncing to and fro between state and society, and the harder one side hits it, the harder it’s hit back. Whoever wins this perverse ballgame, traditional morality always loses.

The distinction between crime and legality survives, if in a modified form, because it’s enforced by the state. But such vital distinctions as those between good and evil or sin and virtue fade away. Holding sway instead is Hemingway’s eudaemonic (demonic?) definition of morality: if it feels good, it’s moral.

That’s why one can confidently predict that many other things that make some people feel good will soon acquire an equal status. Necrophilia, bestiality, incest – use your own imagination.

If one ‘community’ feels good copulating with corpses, animals or animal corpses, and the state doesn’t mind, who are we to cry havoc? In the absence of the ultimate moral authority, on what basis can we object?

This anomic tendency explains the results of the Gallup poll. Acceptance, practically encouragement, of eccentric sexuality means that marginal cases see no reason to desist, on the off chance it’ll feel good.

It’s there, on the margins, where I’m sure the numbers are growing. I’d be surprised if the proportion of hardcore homosexuals changed all that much from one decade to the next. The largest British poll I’ve seen placed their number at somewhere between one and two per cent, and I doubt American data would be strikingly different.

The shocking results of the poll shouldn’t really shock us. All we have to do is juxtapose the aforementioned Hemingway aphorism with the anguished words of Dostoyevsky’s Dmitri Karamazov: “‘But what will become of men then?’ I asked him, ‘without God and immortal life? All things are permitted then, they can do what they like?’”

You know the answer to that one.

.

Well, perhaps not any old rape but just the statutory variety. You know, when it’s all consensual, but one participant is below the age of consent. Let’s call it sexual assault, to be on the safe side – even if there was no violence involved.

That’s what the lawyers acting for Virginia Giuffre, née Roberts, called it. They brought a civil case, which the defendant, Prince Andrew, has just settled for something like £12 million.

Before we go on, let’s get one stipulation out of the way. Prince Andrew is a louche, not particularly bright man covered head to toe with Jeffrey Epstein’s sleaze, plus some of his own. His close friendship with the likes of Jeffrey and Ghislaine is in itself enough to drum him out of the royal family even if he kept his mitts off Virginia’s body.

Yet he wasn’t charged with befriending wrong people for wrong reasons. He was charged with sexual assault, albeit only in the civil courts. And my contention is that, had the case gone to trial, Andrew’s legal team would have walked it.

One fact currently in the public domain is that young Virginia was, not to cut too fine a point, a prostitute. This precise, stylistically neutral term describes a woman who exchanges sex for payment. I could also think of a few words that are less stylistically neutral, but the gentleman in me won’t allow it.

At the time in question, she was flown by private jet from one mansion to another to have sex with Jeffrey, his guests, possibly Ghislaine and, for all I know, household pets. The jets, mansions, clothes, expensive food and drink, possibly jewellery, probably cash were payments for the sexual services rendered.

Andrew was allegedly one guest entertained by Virginia, and she says Epstein ordered her to make herself available. As someone who strives to use words precisely, I’d like to offer a row of verbs all describing encouragement to action in an ascending sequence of imperativeness: suggest, ask, request, demand, order.

One word, order, stands out of this row. A suggestion may be ignored, a request denied, a demand resisted, but an order must be obeyed on pain of punishment. Whoever issues one must be in a position of institutional authority that enables him to enforce the order and punish non-compliance.

So what would have happened had young Virginia told Jeffrey, in what was probably her natural idiom, to stick his order where the sun don’t shine? How could he enforce and punish?

Virginia wasn’t a soldier who could be tried by military tribunal and shot before the ranks. The only punishment she could have suffered was dismissal from her job as prostitute in Epstein’s employ. She could have been held in breach of an unwritten contract she had entered of her own free will.

Since there was no coercion involved, the only thing that could be held against Andrew is that our daisy-fresh Virginia was at the time a few months short of the age of consent, 18 at that time and in that place.

Thus having sex with her was then against the law. However, that law was manifestly unjust – witness the fact that it was changed soon thereafter. And, as the Romans used to say, “lex iniusta non est lex”, an unjust law is no law.

Only 17 per cent of American girls bring an intact hymen to their eighteenth birthday, which isn’t surprising, considering they (and their British counterparts) have been educated since infancy in contraceptive techniques and sexual ballistics. Let’s put it this way: because sex has lost a moral dimension, Virginia and her coevals couldn’t be confused with Jane Austen’s debutantes.

But did Andrew actually defile young Virginia? Her word apart, the only piece of hard evidence is that notorious photograph, which proves that Andrew did know Virginia, though not necessarily carnally.

Andrew, on the other hand, denies having known her, carnally or otherwise, and claims the photo is a fake. Anyone familiar with Photoshop will know that faking an image in that fashion is a matter of minutes, so the claim is plausible.

However, when the photo first began to make the rounds in 2015, Andrew asked Ghislaine what she thought of it. In response, she sent him an e-mail, saying: “It looks real. I think it is.”

“Looks”? “Think”? Hardly a statement of certainty, is it? If I were Virginia’s solicitor, I’d be much happier with something like “Of course it’s real, don’t you remember, Andy? It was taken just after you bonked her the first time.”

One way to prove the photograph is genuine would be to present the original. However, Virginia claimed she had lost it, and I can’t help thinking that this piece of evidence lacks the strength to convince or convict.

The case against the Duke of York looks so weak that one may wonder why he chose to settle it, rather than going to trial, as was his stated intention. The answer seems obvious.

Dragging the case through public hearings would expose the royal family to even more humiliation than it has suffered already. The rumour has it that Prince Charles leaned on his wayward younger brother to settle, and this rings true. The Queen didn’t want this sleaze to rub off on her Jubilee, and she was understandably eager to draw the line under the whole sordid affair.

As it is, republican noises are getting louder, and I’m worried about the future of our monarchy. Those who think Britain could walk away from it whistling a merry tune are ignorant of the catastrophic constitutional implications.

The monarch is the ganglion on which every constitutional synapse of Britain converges. Tony Blair couldn’t even get rid of the post of Lord Chancellor, hard as he tried. He found, against his subversive instincts, that our ancient constitution would have become well-nigh inoperable as a result.

Removing the monarch would destroy every fibre of Britain’s body politic, which is another way of saying Britain would no longer be British. That’s why Andrew, Harry and all other culprits who jeopardise the dignity and grandeur of our central institution deserve whatever punishment they suffer.

If Andrew lives out his life penniless and friendless, I won’t shed a tear. But that doesn’t make him guilty of sexual assault any more than it makes Virginia the innocent victim of it. That £12 million is payment in the form of pay-off, and its size only means she is a great success in her chosen occupation.  

An obituary is a memento mori, which is why I seldom read them. Yet I read one this morning.

For P.J. O’Rourke was a factor in my life, especially when I lived in America. There were only two publications I read regularly then: William Buckley’s National Review and P.J.’s National Lampoon – the former mostly for ideas, the latter mostly for style. Mostly his.

Some writers are born, some are made, and then there was P.J. O’Rourke. If there are any scribes who don’t envy him, they should cast a critical eye over their own work to improve self-awareness. That done, they’ll start turning just the right shade of green when reading O’Rourke’s prose.

He could do with a couple of words what most writers can’t do with a paragraph; with a paragraph, what most writers can’t do with a page; with a page, what most writers can’t do at all.

O’Rourke’s verve and wit were such that one hung on to every word even when the subject-matter was uninteresting or his treatment of it facile. His prose was so effortless that only another writer could appreciate how much effort had gone into it.

To Hemingway, all American literature came out of Huckleberry Finn. That doesn’t mean one could draw a direct line of descent from Twain to, say, Faulkner, although I trust literary scholars to draw such lines even in the unlikeliest places.

But it does mean that Twain was the first genuinely American writer. Thanks to him, America stopped being a literary province of England and began to speak in her own voice.  And she spoke her own mind: irreverent, expansive, colourful to the point of being lurid, streetwise, commonsensical, iconoclastic, often anarchic.

I think it was H.L. Mencken who said, “The worst thing you can say about an American is that he believes everything he reads in the papers.” People who don’t believe everything, often anything, they read in the papers end up mocking received opinions, sometimes subtly, at other times savagely.

They submit the world around them to the test of common sense and tragically find it wanting. Some try to delve into the tragedy, others turn it into comedy. They laugh because grown men don’t cry.

“Repudiation of Europe,” the novelist John Dos Passos once wrote, “is, after all, America’s main excuse for being.”

When repudiation of anything becomes a country’s defining characteristic, its literature has to follow suit – first by decrying or mocking the object of repudiation, then by extending that mode of perception into other areas.

Satire thus became a quintessential American genre, glittering with such stellar masters as Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, H.L. Mencken, Dorothy Parker, Hunter S. Thompson, Joseph Heller, Tom Wolfe – and P.J. O’Rourke.

It was Thompson who created the style of ‘gonzo’ journalism, with which O’Rourke is usually associated. This largely overlaps with New Journalism of which Tom Wolfe was the most prominent practitioner.

In both, the author creates a protagonist central to every narrative: himself. Of course, one could argue that all writers inject their own personality into their work. Yes, but most do so indirectly, with their own selves refracted through so many facets that only a meticulous analyst could reconstruct the writer behind the writing.

There was nothing indirect about Thomson, Wolfe and O’Rourke. They didn’t even try to feign dispassionate objectivity.

No readers had to work hard reconstructing their personalities. O’Rourke’s was no more hidden in his essays than Huck’s was in Twain’s novel. Extending the analogy, O’Rourke was Huck Finn and Mark Twain rolled into one, both creature and creator.

However, he often pointed out that, while the ‘I’ of his prose is closely related to P.J. O’Rourke, they aren’t identical twins. The ‘I’ either exaggerated O’Rourke’s traits or downplayed them. In fact, those who knew him personally talk about his loving, charitable heart before mentioning his cutting wit.

In his National Lampoon days, O’Rourke was a gag writer who in his mid- to late-twenties retained his rebellious teenage persona. His teenage years were in the 1960s, and O’Rourke was then head to toe immersed in the sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll counterculture.

His writing even 10 years later was that of a clever, talented, naughty boy whose work was funny but devoid of any other than shock value. One could never have guessed there was a conservative trying to break out of that countercultural dungeon.

O’Rourke never wrote too much about his Catholicism, but, judging by his evolution, it was a driving force in his life. Christianity in general, and apostolic Christianity especially, can act as a hoist lifting a sincere believer out of the morass of puerile shenanigans, and with O’Rourke that hoist went into full gear.

He began writing political and social commentary, but without losing either his wit or his youthful ‘gonzo’ style. One didn’t expect original insights from O’Rourke – that wasn’t his métier. He said things one could hear from a clever, conservative stranger in a bar. But no such lonely drinker would ever say them with as much coruscating brilliance.

O’Rourke was an American conservative, which is a very different type from European, especially British, ones. His, typically American, brand of conservatism combined economic libertarianism with social anarchism and fierce patriotism.

As a roving correspondent for Rolling Stone magazine (not a well-known haven for conservatives and libertarians), O’Rourke visited most countries in the world and found them all vastly inferior to his own.

He treated Europe in particular with ironic condescension, thereby vindicating Dos Passos and also carrying on the tradition set in motion by the first travel book in American literature, Twain’s The Innocents Abroad. Yet one could still love O’Rourke’s writing just as one took issue with some of his attitudes.

He was first diagnosed with cancer in 2008 and it got him in the end. Expecting that, O’Rourke wrote: “Death is so important that God visited death upon his own son, thereby helping us learn right from wrong well enough that we may escape death forever and live eternally in God’s grace. 

“Thus, the next time I glimpse death … well, I’m not going over and introducing myself. I’m not giving the grim reaper fist daps. But I’ll remind myself to try, at least, to thank God for death. And then I’ll thank God, with all my heart, for whiskey.”

It was as if O’Rourke forgot for a second that he was supposed to be an insouciant, irreverent man about town. Yet at the last moment he remembered, got upset with himself and hastily hit the key in which most of his work had been composed.

I’ll miss him, even though I haven’t read much of him for years. But somehow I’ve always felt the world was a better place, and America a better country, for his presence.

God lavished P.J. O’Rourke with gifts throughout his life. I pray that this will continue after his death.

With this question pragmatic Britons tend to interrupt any extended analysis of economic, political, geopolitical or cultural problems.

When the current Ukrainian crisis is the subject of analysis and I’m the analyst, I reply along the lines of a “whiff of Munich in the air”, a phrase used by our Defence Secretary Ben Wallace. Appeasement, I usually say, has never worked as a deterrent to evil regimes.

We need to introduce draconian sanctions on Russia now, for what she has already done, and guarantee even stiffer ones for each incremental step she takes towards the Ukraine. At the same time we must abandon our insanely suicidal energy policy and become self-sufficient, thereby destroying Russia’s exports and, by introducing a trade embargo, also her imports.

The argument that Russia will then begin to sell all her gas to China is refuted by one word: How? To increase the volume of her supplies to China, Russia would have to build a new pipeline, which would take years – especially without the benefit of Western technology. The option of liquefying gas is even more problematic, for Russia’s liquefication technology is primitive.

I could go on, but you get the general idea. Only a show of strength, unity and resolve will stop amoral aggressors. They despise, rather than respect, those who are nice to them.

This sort of mindset, however, is risibly infantile, according to Mark Almond. The crisis can be ended only by an exercise in what he calls in his article “grown-up diplomacy”, which to him is distinct from appeasement.

I happen to know Mark: in 1995 we were both observers at the Byelorussian election. Over dinner in Minsk, I recall outlining to him my understanding of all those glasnosts and perestroikas as merely a transfer of power from the Party to the KGB. Russia, I said, is still as dangerous as before or, because we don’t realise this, even more so.

Mark looked around furtively, lowered his voice and said: “We can’t say such things. The most we are allowed is a regret that democracy in Russia isn’t developing as fast as we’d wish.”

I thought that was merely typical middle-class fear of expressing strong views. But then I saw Almond appear on RT over the years, preaching an accommodation based on mutual understanding. Much as analogies with Munich are overused and often imprecise, I couldn’t help drawing one with a British academic, c. 1938, toeing a similar line on Goebbels’s radio channel.

So what does Almond mean by “grown-up” diplomacy? It starts with empathy, feeling Russia’s pain.

“We… have to recognise the anxieties of ordinary Russians. Of course, Nato has no intentions of provoking war with Russia – but both the 19th and 20th centuries saw full-scale European invasions through Ukraine, aimed at Moscow. Both Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler in 1941 failed, but the wars left deep scars in the national psyche.”

I’m amazed he didn’t count among the deep scars those left by the 1240 Mongol invasion. The scars he did mention, especially the second lot, are made to fester by incessant, round-the-clock Russian propaganda using them to explain the backwardness of the economy and to justify further aggression against neighbours.

Having thus accepted the stigmata of Putin’s suffering, Almond then proposed his grown-up solution: “Kiev [must] agree to local self-government in the Donbas region. It… might satisfy Russia while leaving Ukraine legally intact and give a beleaguered nation a chance to rebuild its economy.”

Vidkun Quisling couldn’t have put it better. Almond’s grown-up idea is exactly what Putin wants, what his propagandists have been demanding at an increasingly hysterical volume. For, rather than “leaving Ukraine legally intact”, this development would put paid to her as a sovereign country.

The Donbas region was occupied by mercenary bandits Putin armed and used as his proxies. They were led by Russian murderers-for-hire, such as Strelkov-Girkin and ‘Motorola’, and I suggest Almond look them up to understand the situation better (provided that’s what he is after).

Putin is demanding that Kiev recognise the Donetsk and Lugansk provinces as independent precisely because he knows this would inject lethal poison into the country’s body politic. As an immediate effect, it would invalidate the Minsk Accords, held as Holy Writ by Putin and his fans. Hence one has to question either the sanity or the honesty of any Western commentator who goes along with that scheme.

Almond is in good company there. Yesterday the communist faction in the Duma submitted an address to Putin, calling for recognition of the two occupied provinces as independent republics.

Almond then goes on to explain “how wretched, criminal and lawless the Ukrainian economy has become… So much money has been sucked out of the system by successive presidents, cronies and mafia bosses [that the people are still poor].”

All this is true, and I had the chance to observe it when doing consultancy work in Kiev in the late 1990s. But this truth, word for word, equally applies to Russia herself and indeed to most, if not all, ex-Soviet republics. Does this mean we ought to sit back and watch Putin rebuild the Soviet Union by force? That’s what Almond must have in mind, for otherwise this information would be irrelevant to his subject.

Another grown-up solution would be to listen to “Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky [who] pleaded with our Prime Minister to crack down on stolen Ukrainian funds flowing through London.”

Stolen Russian funds flowing through London are greater than Ukrainian ones by orders of magnitude. If we cracked down on those, that would act as an effective deterrent… but I forgot. Doing that to Ukrainians is grown-up; doing that to Russians is childish.

“The West has to recognise how wrong we were to shore up Ukraine’s successive shaky and corrupt governments…,” continues Almond. “At the same time, we have to pander to Putin’s ego and let him claim some sort of victory, without betraying Ukraine’s essential rights… The alternative is almost too awful to contemplate.”

Allow me to paraphrase by excising Aesopian phraseology while keeping the real meaning intact: “The West has to recognise how wrong we were to support, however meekly, the right of nations to self-determination in general and the Ukraine’s sovereignty in particular. Since the only alternative to this recognition is war, we must pander to Putin’s ego and let him claim victory by allowing him to gobble up the Ukraine — for starters.”

Reading this, the KGB colonel must be laughing all the way to the bank. For, even without a full-scale invasion, he has already scored a victory, as denominated in US dollars.

The oil price has climbed to $98 a barrel, a seven-year high. The price of gas is shooting up even faster. The trade in those commodities is in Russia totally controlled by Putin and his cronies. Their kleptofascist regime has thus found that, by ratcheting up the -fascist part of that designation, they can boost the klepto- part no end.

Moreover, any crippling sanctions will also hurt the West, especially Europe, and not only by making energy even dearer. For many European countries have foolishly allowed themselves to be exposed to Russian banks.

In the third quarter of last year, Italy and France were each owed $25 billion, and Austria $17.5. Cutting off Russia from SWIFT, which is one sanction widely mooted, would mean instant default on those loans.

My solution to that problem would be to confiscate all Russian ill-gotten assets held in the West. But, having read Almond’s prescriptions, I realise I still have a lot of growing up to do.

P.S. Here’s an example of Russia’s own grown-up diplomacy. When the other day a local paper asked Tatarintsev, Russian ambassador to Sweden, about the possibility of sanctions, he replied: “We shit on Western sanctions.” This is consonant with Putin’s inaugural promise to “whack terrorists wherever they hide, even in the shithouse.” Freud would have a field day with these excremental allusions.

“Americanism,” my American friend once said, “isn’t a nationality. It’s an idea.” That epigrammatic phrase obscures more than it elucidates. Take a French socialist, by way of illustration.

French is a nationality. Socialist is an idea. Our hypothetical chap happens to be both, but his nationality is in no way contingent on his idea. He may change the idea to, say, royalism, while still remaining as French as before, arguably even more so.

And what exactly is a nationality? In Russia, the term stands for ethnicity, not citizenship, which it does in most other places, including Russia herself under the tsars. (Russians were at the time defined by their religion, not ethnicity. Officially, that is. Unofficial attitudes come across in the proverb “It’s not your passport but your mug that gets punched.”)

All Soviet citizens carried internal passports with ‘Nationality’ one of its rubrics. It was filled with words like ‘Russian’, ‘Ukrainian’ or ‘Jew’, not ‘Soviet’. That practice has been discontinued but, when one Russian asks another “What’s your nationality?”, he still means ethnicity, not citizenship.

The Russian language has two cognates reflecting this distinction. Both are translated as ‘Russian’, but they mean different things. Ruskiy is ethnically Russian; rossiyanin, a Russian citizen.

Britain also has such differentiating words, though they aren’t cognates: British and English (or Scottish, Irish, Welsh). The former is citizenship; the latter, ethnicity.

Someone born elsewhere can become British, but not English. You either are or you aren’t, the luck of the draw. The chance nature of this was emphasised by that great Empire-builder, Cecil Rhodes: “Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life.”

That first prize can be won even by those whose families weren’t English originally. A good friend of mine, for example, has a French surname, and indeed he descends from the Huguenots who found refuge in Britain. Yet my friend considers himself English, and indeed he displays every requisite characteristic: a clipped accent, slightly eccentric dress, club membership and alcoholism.

Britishness can be interpreted narrowly, as a comment on one’s passport; or more broadly, as a statement of self-identification and multiple intersecting loyalties. Thus, though I have two passports, my loyalties are in no way divided: I’m unquestionably British. Why, I’ve even let my US passport lapse, and I pass the Tebbit cricket test with flying colours.

Yet Britishness doesn’t have to be as distinct from Englishness as all that. Neither of them is an ‘idea’. Both are a way of looking at the world, a matter of intuitive assumptions, behavioural patterns and social interactions. None of this can be expressed in a written document, the way the American Declaration of Independence began to express Americanism.

I’m not a great fan of that document, but I love one sentence in it. Actually, not even a whole sentence but a phrase: “We hold these truths as self-evident…” A nation is indeed largely defined by the truths most people intuitively hold as axiomatic.

That’s why it would never occur to my friend to describe himself as French. He is an Englishman who happens to have a French surname. Another close friend has an Irish surname, and indeed his family barrel has more than a spoonful of Irish blood. But he is so proudly English that, when in his cups, he’ll punch you if you dispute that.

The two men are quite different, but many of their intuitive assumptions are identically English and British. That’s why they are English and British (I’m not a great believer in genetic memory and the voice of blood).  

Yet Biden routinely refers to himself as Irish, which, mostly on his mother’s side, he ethnically is. Some of this self-identification is strictly political opportunism. In many parts of America securing the Irish vote goes a long way towards an electoral victory, and Joe is a politician before anything else.

In case of mixed origin, an American politician will automatically choose the more politically expedient component. Thus mulatto Barack Obama calls himself black, hinting at the unlikely possibility that his black father begat him by parthenogenesis.

The issue isn’t that simple though. For one can observe that many Americans have, or at least cultivate, the intuitive assumptions prevalent in the lands of their forefathers. Ancestral feuds figure prominently in that package, and they seem to travel well.

The ethnic aspect in ‘American’ appears to be weaker than not only in ‘French’ or ‘English’, but even in ‘British’. The word doesn’t seem to define a person’s intuitive (as opposed to rational) assumptions to the same extent.

That’s odd, even though the US is platitudinously described as a country of immigrants. No doubt that’s what it used to be, but today some 87 per cent of Americans are born and bred, compared to 86 per cent of Britons. Yet no one calls Britain a country of immigrants, not quite yet anyway.

Biden’s maternal Irish ancestors arrived in America about 170 years ago. One would think that’s long enough for him to stop describing himself as Irish, especially since his father’s family was mostly English.

Yet Biden stubbornly clings to his Hibernian heritage, and not all of that self-identification is disingenuous. Some intuitive assumptions seem to have migrated into his mind from the Emerald Isle.

Hatred of the English is one intuitive assumption that many Irishmen share, or are supposed to. Apparently, Biden’s mother possessed that little prejudice not just in spades but in the other three suits as well.

On her trip to England she once stayed at a hotel whose staff proudly told her that the Queen had spent a night there in the past. Mrs Biden was so mortified that she slept the whole night on the floor, for fear of contaminating her flesh by contact with the same bed where Her Majesty might have slept.

That’s not just an idiosyncratic affectation. It’s virulent hatred, and no doubt Mrs Biden raised little Joe in that spirit. Then again, my mother tried to raise me as a loyal Soviet, in which undertaking she failed spectacularly.

How successful was Joe’s mother in injecting her hatred into his bloodstream? And if she succeeded even to a limited degree, does this sentiment affect President Biden’s approach to foreign policy?

According to Georgia Pritchett’s autobiography My Mess Is a Bit of a Life (I like this spoonerism so much I just might buy the book), Biden’s mother had a profound influence on his life. The talented Mrs Biden exerted that influence even in poetic form, by writing “hundreds of poems describing how God must smite the English and rain blood on their heads.”

I don’t know how much of it has rubbed off on little Joe. Some has, that’s for sure. Otherwise the president wouldn’t have insisted that any trade deal with Britain depends “upon respect for the [Good Friday] Agreement and preventing the return of a hard border. Period.” Taking ethnicity out of consideration, it’s not clear why a US president should base trade policy on how hard the border is between two foreign countries.

Noticing that he seems to have Irish interests close to heart, while sometimes treating Britain cavalierly, some people wonder if Mrs Biden’s influence is affecting the ‘special relationship’. I can reassure them that it isn’t – for the simple reason that the ‘special relationship’ is, and always has been, more in the nature of British wishful thinking than reality.

Using the Lendlease programme as an example, one could argue that the US had a special relationship with the Soviet Union, not Britain. The former got American supplies for free, while Britain had to sell all her gold and overseas assets to pay cash on the nail. And when that ran out, an IOU came into effect. Only in 2006 did Britain finally pay off her special allies.

More recently, Ronald Reagan (who also had Irish roots) refused to share intelligence information with Britain during the Falklands War, and Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger had to disobey Reagan’s orders to do so. Even more recently, Biden ordered unilateral troop withdrawal from Afghanistan without bothering to inform America’s British allies in advance and leaving them in the lurch.

Americans seem to take it for granted that a president’s ethnic origin, no matter how partial and remote, will have at least some bearing on his foreign policy. Yet a Briton would be shocked if Boris Johnson showed a political bias towards Turkey just because he had a Turkish great-grandfather.

The upshot of it is that America and Britain are two countries divided by more than just a common language. The Anglo-Saxons as a homogeneous unity are a figment of French or Russian imagination.