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The Russian chieftain has abandoned pretence. What’s going on in the Ukraine, he explained (through one of his mouthpieces), should no longer be called a ‘military operation’.

It’s actually a war. And not any old war either. It’s the beginning of the Third World War.

For once, Putin didn’t lie. That’s exactly what is going on. I’ve been saying this for almost two months, and I have to compliment Vlad for finally owning up to the obvious truth.

It is indeed the Third World War, and Putin plans to win it. His chances of doing so will greatly improve unless the West joins the conflict. The first step would be to realise what’s unfolding before our eyes and stop wallowing in self-denial.

Fascist dictators ought to be believed because, unlike democratic politicians, they can make their objectives plain. After all, they aren’t accountable to public opinion, and they don’t have to suffer a free press screaming bloody murder whenever they do something monstrous.

The Kremlin gang is no longer happy with their palaces, yachts, jets and harems. All those good things in life have intoxicated them so deeply that they now want to conquer the world.

Whenever some friend or foe of the regime points out this objective, the world bursts out laughing. Just look at the state of the Russian economy, says the world once it has caught its breath after the paroxysms of merriment. What is it, two per cent of global GDP?

The Russian army has proved incapable of occupying even the Ukraine. And now they want to occupy all five continents? How ridiculous can you get?

The world has had plenty of experience practising guffawing incredulity. The most obvious example was the global response to Hitler’s plans to cleanse Europe of Jews, laid down in quite some detail in Mein Kampf.

Considering that the book was written in 1925, when Hitler was in prison after his unsuccessful putsch, those plans sounded risible. First, the Nazis would have to take over Germany, which was clearly impossible.

But even assuming in a wild dream that they could do that, Germany would then have to conquer the places where most European Jews lived, which was to say most of Europe.

Just look at the state of the German economy, sneered the naysayers. It’s a basket case after the combined effects of the war and Versailles. Germany will never again be strong enough to fight even a local war. She isn’t even allowed to have an army worthy of the name.

Global conquest? The naysayers were convulsed with derisory laughter. Yet just 14 years later no one was laughing any longer.

It’s true that so far Russia has been unable to occupy the Ukraine, and God knows she tried. One doesn’t have to be a military strategist to know that Russia will never be able to occupy even Eastern Europe, never mind your Germanys, Frances and Britains.

Yet people who are comforted by that realisation are like the generals who, according to Churchill, always fight the last war. And fair enough, in the Second World War both Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union set for themselves the objective of physically occupying much of the world, starting with Europe.

And both evil regimes largely, though not entirely, succeeded in achieving those objectives. In that pre-nuclear, pre-electronic, pre-globalised age it was still possible for a determined aggressor to put its garrison into most European capitals. Not for ever perhaps, but for a few years or decades.

The world is no longer like that. Neither Hitler nor Stalin could make a credible threat to wipe out the world at the push of a button. Neither Hitler nor Stalin could paralyse an enemy’s economy with a few strokes of computer keys. Neither Hitler nor Stalin could impose his terms on global financial markets.

Putin can do all those things, as he has been threatening to do for 20 years. It’s not for nothing that his General Staff has developed the concept of hybrid war.

The hybrid is an ogre that doesn’t just eat humans. It controls them by a threat of cannibalism. To that strategic end it deploys many tactics, some involving violence, some more subtle.

All of them are underpinned with the threat of a nuclear holocaust. Putin is saying in plain Russian that he isn’t afraid of using doomsday weapons, and neither does he subscribe to the MAD doctrine.

He knows that any use of nuclear weapons, even low-yield ones, could escalate to a strategic shootout. However, he is certain that the West would do anything – anything – to avoid such a possibility.

Friends, Westerners, countrymen, lend Putin your ears, as Shakespeare would say. Listen to what he is saying. Believe what he says.

From the very start, he has been stating in the clearest of terms that “de-Nazifying and de-militarising” the Ukraine is only an intermediate objective, a step along the way. His real aim is to rid the world of the American hegemony, to reshape the post-1945 world order of which America has been the principal guarantor.

In other words, Putin has set out to replace American hegemony with his own. And if the world resists, he’s ready to push that button, see if he cares.

Putin doesn’t want to occupy Europe. He wants to finlandise it, a term much in use until 1991. Finland was technically neutral at the time, but in practice she had to adjust her foreign policy to the Soviets’ orders. The Soviets even had veto power over ministerial appointments. That wasn’t occupation. But it was control.

That’s exactly what Putin is after. He wants to dictate terms, certainly to Europe, possibly to the whole world, this side of China. If allowed to do so, Russian nazified bandits would gain freedom of the continent, using it as their own bailiwick kept up as a source of finance, technology, entertainment, medical care and picturesque mooring facilities for 500-foot yachts.

That bailiwick would have to adjust its policies to Russia’s whims. Failure to do so would be cause for chastisement with the odd bombing raid or a quick raping and looting foray into the offender’s cities. And the cudgel of the ultimate punishment with thermonuclear weapons would always be in plain view.

Commentators mocking the performance of the Russian army in the Ukraine or gloating over the sinking of the Moskva should contain themselves. Instead they’d be well-advised to consider their country’s response should Putin hit, say, Kharkov with a tactical nuke.

Messrs Biden and Johnson are uttering belligerent warnings of a stern response. But how stern? Would they respond in kind, knowing that this could escalate to Armageddon?

I’m not saying they wouldn’t, and I’m not saying they would. But the wrong answer to that question may well initiate the dystopic scenario I outlined above.

If Russia is allowed to subjugate the Ukraine by using nuclear or chemical weapons (there seems to be no other way) with impunity, the West will suffer the fate of a wimpish boy who submits to the courtyard bully once, only then to become his bitch in perpetuity.

When you are riding a tiger, say Asian sages, the most dangerous thing is to stop. Putin is riding the tiger of an escalating global conflict, and he won’t stop unless forced to do so.

He won’t accept defeat because that would be suicidal not only for him personally but for the whole project of a kleptofascist Russia lording it over the West. Let’s ponder this, before our thoughts turn to the Resurrection of Our Lord.

For a pun to work, both meanings of the word have to make sense. In this case, they do. The word ‘revolting’ describes both what they do and what they are.

According to Le Figaro, the students of some of France’s best universities, such as Sorbonne, Ecole Normale Supérieure and Sciences Po, were rioting in Paris yesterday.

It’s not quite 1968, when Paris was paralysed, universities were taken over by rioters, and the economy of France was brought to a standstill for almost two months. That may be yet to come.

Meanwhile, France’s academic elite trashed classrooms, broke up furniture and bombarded the police vans in attendance by hurling books, chairs and – potentially most lethal – fire extinguishers out of the windows. When thrown from a great height, those appliances can cause a few headaches.

Realising this, the cops did the sensible thing and withdrew beyond the fire extinguisher range. They then returned fire with tear gas.

A TV journalist trying to film the fun was told: “Get rid of your camera, arsefucker!” That shows that France’s budding academics happily leave their lexical ivory tower when sufficiently provoked. No elitism anywhere in sight.

Yesterday’s riots were caused by the students’ dissatisfaction with the presidential elections and also with their curricula. That isn’t objectionable in itself, but the nature of their dissatisfaction is.

Considering that 42 per cent of young French people didn’t vote, one might get the impression they are apolitical. In fact, as the posters wielded by the rioters prove, they are anything but.

The students were unhappy with the choice in the forthcoming runoff election. This was made abundantly clear by the poster “Neither Le Pen nor Macron!” I understand their frustration. The choice is indeed unsavoury.

I was about to compliment the youngsters on their contempt for modern democracies that unfailingly throw up nothing but unfit candidates. But then I saw other posters, which made it clear what their preference was.

In fact, that was clear even without the posters. Almost a third of the rump group of youngsters who did vote opted for Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Now, Jean-Luc’s party is called La France Insoumise (France Unbowed), but I don’t want to confuse you with meaningless nomenclatures.

Not to cut too fine a point, Mélenchon is a communist. Or rather he is a watermelon: red on the inside, green on the outside.

As far as students of France’s best universities are concerned, those are ideal credentials for running the country. Their preference was expressed with typically youthful vigour: “Macron, resign! Give your place to Mélenchon!” “No to the extreme Right!” “No fascists in our universities!” “Burn Saint-Germain, with Macron and Le Pen in the middle!” “Stop doing nothing about climate change!”

Clearly, those youngsters haven’t yet mastered political nuances. Thus they lump together as “extreme Right” and “fascists” both Macron and Le Pen. Since the two candidates have little in common, they can’t both be those awful things, although I agree that both are indeed awful.

As to burning Saint-Germain, I wish they were more specific. Do they wish to immolate just the abbey of that name or the whole area where the magnificent church is located? The former would be easier, and in fact their typological ancestors did try something like that during the Revolution.

But even the Jacobins didn’t have the ambition of burning down all of what now is the 6^th Arrondissement. Of course, modern revolutionaries can benefit from scientific advances made since the 18^th century. I’m sure Monsieur Poutine will be happy to provide tonnes of plastique, free of charge.

Now, the students are also unhappy about things taught at their institutions. That’s par for the course. I am sure that Abelard, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure and other students of the precursor to the Sorbonne had their grievances too.

Yet I doubt they expressed their displeasure by throwing heavy objects out of windows. Instead, they turned their university into the academic hub of the world, Paris into its cultural apex, and their time into the greatest intellectual peak of our civilisation.

Then again, their interests were different from what today’s lot consider paramount, according to one of the rioters: “racist, Islamophobic and misogynist violence, climate change, CO₂ emissions.” In other words, to cite yet another poster: “Revolution is a must!”

Lest you may think I have it in for the French, you are mistaken. French youngsters do tend to express their interests more violently than their British counterparts, which I suppose may have something to do with their more southerly temperament and a less stable system of governance.

But intellectual vacuity, moral degradation, anomie, destructiveness, hatred for the West with its cultural, political and intellectual traditions – none of these is the exclusive property of French students. Their counterparts in Britain, the US and, I suspect, throughout the West, are no better.

Ten to twenty years from now these rioters will have put their degrees from the most prestigious universities to good use. They’ll be running France, whichever party is in power.

This doesn’t bode well for the country’s – and the West’s – future, even if we make allowances for some growing up occurring in the interim. All things considered, I’m beginning to agree with a friend of mine, who always cites “young person” as an example of an oxymoron.

The other day a friend of mine had dinner with his publisher in Paris. The Frenchman said he supported Putin unreservedly and called Zelensky a “war criminal”.

Before Bucha, such sentiments would have been merely stupid. Now they are evil.

They are also scary when expressed in France, where a Putin agent of influence has a good chance of becoming president and re-enacting the dystopian script of The Manchurian Candidate.

If you question this description of Marine Le Pen, consider her statements the other day. In common with some of our hacks (one in particular springs to mind), she not only expressed solidarity with Putin, but did so by repeating Kremlin propaganda practically verbatim.

Putin’s mole called for “strategic rapprochement” between Nato and Putin’s Russia after the end of the current war. By way of justification, she offered the canard peddled by Putin’s Goebbelses for at least a decade.

If we are beastly to Putin, said Le Pen, he’ll get in bed with China, and we don’t want that to happen: “This is in the interest of France and Europe but also I think the United States… which has no interest in seeing a close Sino-Russian relationship emerging.” Nether does China, on current evidence.

She also added that France must again pull out of Nato’s military command, for starters. Actually, who needs Nato anyway: “We must ask about the role of the alliance after the end of the Warsaw Pact.”

I can only repeat myself. Before Bucha, such sentiments would have been merely stupid. Now they are evil.

At a time when a fascist regime is committing genocide in a major European country, openly threatening to do the same to many others, only two types of people can question the role of Nato: either clinical morons or Putin’s agents. And I don’t think Le Pen is moronic.

As the investigation of Russia’s crimes in Bucha gathers momentum, more and more gruesome facts come to light.

Scenes are emerging of parents tied to chairs and made to watch their children, girls and boys, being tortured and raped, with the whole family executed afterwards. At other times, the roles would be reversed, with the children tied to the chairs to watch their mothers being raped and killed.

Dozens of girls aged 10 to 14 were kept in a cellar for days, being raped all the time and knowing that their parents had been murdered. Those girls, nine of whom are now pregnant, weren’t killed. Instead they were told didactically to remember not to cross Russia ever again.

Hundreds of locals were tortured and then executed in the proven KGB style, with a bullet in the nape of the neck. For the sake of variety, some were hanged.

It’s not just Bucha either. There are dozens of similar places where the atrocities are as bad, or even worse.

Nor are these isolated incidents that tend to happen in all wars. In this war, it’s a deliberate genocidal strategy aimed at breaking the Ukrainian soldiers’ morale by annihilating their families back home. The damage isn’t collateral. It’s intended.

It’s only in this context that the appointment of Gen. Dvornikov as supreme Russian commander in the Ukraine can be properly understood.

Generals are seldom jacks-of-all-trades. Some are better known for their steadfastness in defence, others for their mastery of offensive thrusts.

Gen. Dvornikov is known for neither. His stock in trade is mass murder of civilians with every available weapon, including battle gas.

He first distinguished himself in this type of warfare (and no other) as a regimental commander in the second Chechen War. But he really made his bones as the commander of Russian troops in Syria.

It was Dvornikov who used chemical weapons there, and not just on armed units. He gassed the civilians of Aleppo and then proceeded to raze that city, one of the world’s oldest.

By appointing a commander known for such narrow specialisation, Putin made his intentions plain. Unable to make any headway against the Ukrainian army, he wants to exterminate Ukrainian civilians.

If traditional weapons don’t do the trick, Putin’s hitman Dvornikov will turn to gas, and we’ve already had unproven reports of chemical weapons being used in Mariupol. And if that doesn’t work, he won’t hesitate to go nuclear.

Some knowledgeable commentators doubted a fortnight ago whether Russian officers would comply with the order to use such weapons on Ukrainians. No such doubts now: Gen. Dvornikov will push any button he is ordered to push. And he’ll enjoy doing so.

Calling for a rapprochement with a regime capable of committing such atrocities on a vast scale is beyond evil. It would be downright satanic if Le Pen acted of her own accord.

But I for one don’t think for a second that she is a free agent. She’s Putin’s agent, and her election would deal a severe blow not just to France, and not only to the West, but to our whole civilisation.

Mercifully, other countries don’t share Le Pen’s doubts about the role of Nato. Both Finland and Sweden, which historically tried to maintain neutrality (and Finland, more than just that), are now falling over themselves to join.

Unlike Le Pen, along with other assorted quislings and useful idiots, they understand that the Ukraine is only the first stage in Russia’s war on the West. They know that, had Putin succeeded in his plan to overrun the Ukraine in a few days, he wouldn’t have stopped.

The Baltics would probably have been next, and then Finland and Sweden would have been given a powerful reason to regret their attempts at wishy-washy neutrality.

No neutrality is possible after Bucha, nor any ‘rapprochement’ with the evil, aggressive regime in the Kremlin. The line of moral demarcation has been drawn. The world has gone binary: people are either against Putin’s fascism or for it.

Those who are against may feel that way for all sorts of reasons, not all of them moral or otherwise praiseworthy. Some politicians, for example, may only want to ride the way of anti-Putin sentiment to electoral victory.

But those who still support Putin are unquestionably accomplices to evil, and therefore evil themselves. The middle ground has been annihilated by bombs raining on civilians; it has been strewn with the mangled bodies of innocent people, many of whom had been tortured and raped before they died.

I wish I could vote in the French runoff election. I’d pinch my nostrils and vote for Macron, or rather against Le Pen. More than once, if I could.

Abortion, unless performed to save the mother’s life, has been outlawed in Oklahoma. Earlier this year, Texas and Mississippi stopped short of a total ban, instead limiting abortions to the first six and 15 weeks of pregnancy respectively.

Predictably, all these laws have whipped up a storm of impassioned clamour both pro and mostly con. The Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling on Roe vs Wade, which legalised abortion nationally, is again in the news.

Jen Psaki, the press secretary to that good Catholic Joe Biden, described all such bills as an “unconstitutional attack on women’s rights”, and she wasn’t just speaking for herself.

On the other hand, real (as opposed to ‘good’) Catholics, along with some communicants in other denominations, are hailing the new law on religious grounds. They refuse to see abortion as a God-given right, nor one specified in America’s founding documents. These mention the right to life, not to nipping one in the bud.

These events, and the widespread reaction to them, have highlighted the trifurcation of the argument. For there exist only three possible stands on the issue.

Miss Psaki and her ilk see abortion at any stage in pregnancy as one of those inalienable rights the Declaration of Independence failed to mention only by oversight. They regard Roe vs Wade as equivalent to the lapidary commandments Moses pulled out of the burning bush.  

To the Oklahoma legislature, along with Catholics and other orthodox Christians, abortion is the arbitrary taking of a human life. Yet they tend to agree, though not universally, that the choice of the mother’s life over the embryo’s must be allowed should the necessity arise.

Many other people, including those in various legislatures, don’t oppose abortion in principle, but they have misgivings about administering the procedure in the later stages of pregnancy. Most European governments are also in that camp. In Britain, for example, abortion isn’t allowed after 24 weeks, unless the mother’s life is at risk or the child would be born with a severe disability.

My own position has always been rooted in dispassionate ratiocination. Any such process must involve the ability to strip an issue down to its bare essentials. Having performed that divesting operation, I have to reject the third position out of hand. There’s no logic to it.

Catholic doctrine, on the other hand, is irrefutably logical. Life is a gift from God received at conception. Therefore, abortion is tantamount to the unlawful killing of a human being, thereby contravening one of the aforementioned lapidary commandments.

Miss Psaki and her fellow abortionists don’t lack some logic either. A foetus, they argue, isn’t a human being. Until it pops out of the womb it remains but a part of the woman’s body, hers to dispose of as she sees fit. No substantive difference exists between an abortion and, say, an appendectomy.

Such are the two extreme ends to the argument, and both can be profitably reduced to a single overarching question: whether or not the foetus gestating in a woman’s body is a human being. If the answer is yes, abortion is abhorrent. If the answer is no, there’s nothing wrong with it.

I happen to agree with the first proposition and disagree with the second, but neither contradicts the demands of sound logic. However, the intermediate position, limiting abortion to some arbitrary point during pregnancy, just doesn’t make sense.

And, by showing why it doesn’t make sense, I can explain, without as much as mentioning religion, why I welcome Oklahoma’s decision, but not that in either Texas or Mississippi.

Both states implicitly accept the notion that a human life is born in the womb at some point, beyond which it mustn’t be destroyed. In Texas, this point comes at six weeks. In Mississippi, human life is later in arriving: it takes nine weeks longer. Why don’t they just split the difference and settle on 10.5 weeks?

It’s the sheer inability to pinpoint the exact moment at which a human life is born that ought to clinch the argument. The only indisputable point is that of conception. Everything else is open to the possibility of error, and we in the West have always tended to err on the side of protecting human life.

All extraneous arguments endlessly gravitate towards inanity. For example, I’ve heard people say that, since a foetus can’t survive on its own, it isn’t a human being. That argument doesn’t hold water.

If self-sufficiency is a sine qua non of humanity, then neither little children nor some very old or ill people are human (and neither am I, if you believe Penelope). Yet, though some calls for euthanising the latter are heard, I have yet to encounter any mention of wholesale infanticide – this side of the Massacre of the Innocents, that is.

These days a foetus can be fully gestated in vitro, which alone should eliminate the argument from self-sufficiency, much as some of us find such experiments distasteful.

Rather than being an actual human being, a foetus is an inchoate one. Here the notion of potentiality, central to Aristotle’s metaphysics, comes into play. A foetus possesses all the physical, spiritual and moral attributes of a human being in embryonic form, as it were.

This potentiality will inexorably develop into actuality under any normal conditions. It can only be prevented from doing so by either a medical accident or a violent intervention.

The same goes not only for a foetus but also for a new-born baby. The baby also possesses only a potential for developing into a fully fledged human being. Thus, denying that property to a foetus would remove any logical and moral objections to post-natal abortion, and yet I’m sure even Jen Psaki would balk at that.

Such are the arguments against abortion. I’d suggest they appear intellectually weightier than a woman’s reluctance to take time off from her career or to start having less fun, of the party-going sort.

Yesterday’s heresies become today’s orthodoxies, and “women’s rights” is one such. Yet neither women nor men have rights indigenous to them. All such rights are bogus. People in general have real rights, those that involve no concomitant obligations on anyone else’s part.

The right to life falls into that category. The right to abortion doesn’t – logically speaking.

When I was a youngster, a professor, who later became a close friend, taught me how to look at Gaugin’s Tahitian nudes.

He pointed out the artist’s subdued palette and unusual perspectives, along with the stylistic tribute he paid to native art. Above all, he shared his own optic discovery, which I would have been incapable of making on my own.

Gaugin’s paintings appear flat, said my older friend. But if you focus your eyes on the centre of the composition and stay motionless for a while, the picture will miraculously acquire so much depth as to appear almost three-dimensional.

The next day I went to the Pushkin Museum and put that observation to a test. And sure enough, after a minute or two the painting turned into what decades later got to be called a virtual reality show. New planes of vision opened up, drawing me into the midst of the composition, as if making me a part of it.

Decades have ticked by since then, but the lesson I learned that day has stood me in good stead, and not only with Gaugin – for that matter not only with painting. Great masters, whatever their art, never limit themselves to a single plane, just one dimension. They always protect their depths from a casual glance, demanding that their viewer, listener, reader become their co-author, or else co-conspirator partaking in the mystery known to few.

Try my friend’s trick next time you look at a Gaugin nude, see if it works for you the way it worked for me. It may or may not. But, acting as my late friend’s conduit, I am only trying to convey my general understanding of how cultured people should talk about art.

The curators of London’s Courtauld Gallery disagree. That’s not at all what one should look for in a Gaugin painting, specifically in one of his most celebrated works, Nevermore, depicting the painter’s Tahitian mistress Pahura.

Obviously those scholarly chaps couldn’t have decorticated every aspect of Gaugin’s work in the information panel they attached to it. So they singled out what they saw as the most important aspect (just as my friend did, all those years ago):

“Instead of the unspoilt paradise he had imagined, he found a society corrupted by decades of colonialism. That did not prevent him from taking advantage of his position as a European coloniser. Pahura was one of the teenagers that he took as his ‘wives’. The widespread racist fantasy of Tahitian girls as sexually precocious led to their unabashed exploitation.”

A minor point first. My trusted dictionary defines fantasy as “the activity of imagining impossible or improbable things.” But since Gaugin actually slept with those girls, that activity was very much real, and neither impossible nor improbable.

Believing that young Polynesian girls were sexually available would have been racist if a) that indeed was a racial fantasy, which it wasn’t, and b) if that belief was based solely or chiefly on their race, which it wasn’t either. So that’s just woke gibberish, with no substance to it whatsoever.

The same goes for Pahura’s precocity. She was 15 at the time, which in the 19^th century wasn’t regarded as all that sexually precocious even in Europe. Girls routinely got married in their early teens, which presupposed some sexual hanky-panky.

In French Polynesia, which at the time was regularly devastated by deadly epidemics, Pahura’s life expectancy would have been somewhere around 30. Hence she had already lived about half her life when she became Gaugin’s mistress. Counting from the other end, she was no more sexually precocious than a modern English woman in her early 40s.

All that is neither here nor there, compared to the staggering vulgarity of describing a work of art in such terms. This, in the language of the Beatles, is ‘back in the USSR’.

At the time my friend was teaching me things about Gaugin, the only art form permitted in the Soviet Union was ‘socialist realism’. Paintings were assessed not on their aesthetic merits, of which typically there were none, but on the politically correct message they communicated.

Rosy-cheeked, fully dressed collective farmers dancing around a tractor, or little girls swearing allegiance to the Hammer and Sickle were in. Nudes were out for Soviet painters – as the then-Culture Minister Furtseva explained, “There is no sex in the Soviet Union”.

Shostakovich was castigated for failing to convey such visual images in his music; Pasternak, for a similar oversight in his poetry. On the other hand, painters, musicians and writers who toed the line were hailed as immortal geniuses, even though, with very few exceptions, they were incompetent.

After spending my first 25 years in that dystopic hell, I developed a heightened sensitivity to similar perversions popping up elsewhere. My nose begins to twitch whenever self-serving vulgarians reduce the greatest achievements of the human spirit to a session of ideological indoctrination.

Yet no heightened sensitivity is required these days to detect what’s in plain view: our culturati and literati are waging a war of annihilation on the greatest culture in human history. When they can’t ban works of art – an inability rapidly becoming extinct – they do their utmost to vulgarise them with inane comments.

At least in the Moscow of my youth there were still men like my late friend, who could steer youngsters in the right direction. Today his typological equivalents are knocking off woke labels for great paintings.    

Rishi is embroiled in a scandal involving his wife. So, a couple of millennia earlier, was Julius. Yet the two men handled the scandals differently, which is a comment not only on them but also on their times.

The earlier scandal occurred when a patrician politician, Publius Clodius Pulcher, tried to seduce Caesar’s wife, Pompeia.

Publius, it has to be said, had a rep as quite a goer. This he proved by dressing as a woman to sneak into a girls-only party hosted by Pompeia. Historians still argue whether Publius had designs on Pompeia or one of the vestal virgins present.

One way or the other, the subsequent trial established Pompeia’s innocence. In spite of that, Caesar divorced her, saying: “My wife ought not even to be under suspicion”.  

The scandal involving the Chancellor’s wife, Akshata Murty, proves the truth of the title above – whatever Rishi Sunak’s self-image. And the nature of the brouhaha is as different as the two men are.

Unlike Pompeia, Akshata Murty has had no aspersion cast on her sexual behaviour. It’s her fiscal practices that have produced so much public indignation that the Ukraine receded into the background of reported news.

Mrs Sunak has taken advantage of a loophole in our tax laws by claiming a non-domiciled status. That means she doesn’t have to pay British tax on any income generated abroad.

We aren’t talking tuppence here and there. Mrs Sunak’s father is an Indian billionaire, and his daughter owns 0.91 per cent of the shares in his company. Quite apart from the staggering value of that position, her dividends alone amounted to over £11 million last year.

The non-dom law may be hard for the masses to swallow, but it’s still the law. As Julius Caesar might have said, dura lex, sed lex. It goes back to the time of the Raj, when British colonisers had to be encouraged to keep the Empire going.

Surprisingly, this provenance hasn’t so far been brought up by Mr Sunak’s detractors, and I hope I’m not giving them a tip for another angle of attack. Any association with the erstwhile Empire, no matter how tangential, is these days cause for at least abject apologies, but I hope this sleeping dog will be allowed to lie.

Neither Mrs nor Mr Sunak has done anything illegal, and no one is claiming otherwise. Since envy has never been expunged from human nature, their wealth can be annoying to some, but that slap in the public’s face hasn’t yet been criminalised.

Yet the scandal is a crossroads on which legality, ethics and politics intersect, with a rich potential for head-on collisions. Now we’ve dismissed legality as a serious consideration, let’s look at the other two avenues.

Modernity is as obsessed with form as it’s dismissive of substance. Whole armies of expensive lawyers, accountants and consultants keep a watchful eye on the letter of tax laws, while ignoring their spirit.

If it’s legal, it’s moral – such is the central commandment of the religion called Modernity. The reverse doesn’t necessarily apply though. Thus a man who protects his family by killing a feral intruder may go to prison even though he has done nothing immoral. But when it comes to fiscal shenanigans, legality subsumes morality.

The non-dom laws apply to citizens of a foreign country who have lived in Britain for less than 15 years. However, one may suggest that a foreign citizen married to someone occupying the second-highest political post in the UK, and therefore living in a Downing Street house funded by the taxpayer, may want to forgo climbing through the non-dom loophole.

Some may even question the propriety of a Chancellor’s wife not being a British subject. As a foreign citizen, Mrs Sunak owes no statutory allegiance to the very Crown of which her husband is a minister. That doesn’t make him (or her) a traitor, but it does make the Sunaks open to questions about divided loyalties.

After all, the religion said Crown is obligated to uphold says this about husband and wife: “twain shall be one flesh: so they are no more twain, but one flesh”. When it comes to a Chancellor and his wife, twain would be well-advised to be not just one flesh, but also one political entity.

I’m sure Mrs Sunak’s citizenship application would go through without a hitch should she wish to pledge allegiance to the country whose finances her husband oversees. But I understand that money talks louder than anything else – that’s another endearing commandment of Modernity.

After all, Rishi won’t remain Chancellor for ever. He’ll make a good go at moving from 11 to 10 Downing Street but, should that fail, I don’t quite see him on the back benches. He’ll probably try to become a mogul to end all moguls, and every saved million will be a step towards that upper rung.

Having touched on legality and ethics, we have thus got into politics, and yet again I have to bemoan the staggering incompetence of our politicians. They’ve devoted their lives to gaining power by charting their way into public support, yet they seem to have learned next to nothing.

Wise policies would be the most obvious door-opener, but we don’t live in the Roman Empire, nor even in the British one. Our voting public doesn’t really expect wise policies from the government, and it wouldn’t be able to recognise them anyway.

If expertly spun, any policy can be sold as wise, provided no wholesale murder of firstborn sons is mandated. All a politician should do is keep his nose clean and refrain from doing too much damage.

Mr Sunak has failed on the second requirement by raising taxes at a time when any competent economist knows they must be cut. Overtaxing a flagging economy is a proven strategy for turning a recession into a depression, but Rishi isn’t really to blame.

He lives in a country trampled over by a whole herd of sacred cows, all covered by the mighty bull of the NHS. And sacred cows may be milked, but they can’t be slaughtered.

The country can’t afford to continue pledging allegiance to the welfare state, and not only for economic but also for moral reasons. But that battle can’t be won, nor even engaged.

No MP will stay in Parliament for long if he questions the very foundations on which our economy rests. And a Chancellor cutting NHS and other social funding enough to make a difference will stay in the job for roughly as long as it’ll take him to write a resignation letter.

However, if Rishi can’t be blamed for his de rigueur economic sabotage (“It’s all the zeitgeist’s fault, m’lord”), he certainly can be blamed for his inept handling of political mechanics.

Like so many chancellors before him, he wants to become PM, which means unseating Johnson. Now Johnson has shown his own lack of political nous by holding what Pushkin called ‘a feast in time of plague’, otherwise known as Partygate.

Everything secret shall become manifest, to quote the Good Book again – especially if someone has a vested interest in making it so. The only way for the general public to get the news of the Number 10 party was for someone present, or perhaps a next-door neighbour, to spill the beans.

Since Messrs Johnson and Sunak are seen not only as cabinet colleagues, but also political rivals, it would be consistent with fallen human nature to surmise that the leak came from someone associated with Mr Sunak or even him himself.

Putting the political shoe on the other foot, it’s similarly likely that the general public was made aware of Mrs Sunak’s tax status by someone who’d rather see Mr Johnson extend his lease on Number 10. It’s beyond me to imagine how the two men for whom politics is their whole life could leave themselves open to so much mud-slinging.

Score a massive one for the PM, who has been running up the score anyway, what with his good war. Mr Johnson’s passionate commitment to the Ukraine can’t be fully understood outside the realm of British domestic politics.

The Sunaks are desperately trying to stop the rot. Akshata Murty has moved out of the official residence and undertaken to start paying UK taxes on non-UK income. Her husband has referred the case to the ethics committee, confidently expecting absolution.

That’s unlikely to be enough. If Rishi doesn’t want to kiss his ambitions good-bye, he should do a Julius and divorce Akshata Murty, citing the same aphoristic phrase. But, God forbid, not in the original Latin. He can’t come across not only as a fat cat but also as a cultural snob.    

Uxor mea ne suspecta quidem debet, in case you are interested.

Now that Russian monstrosity in the Ukraine has made the world shudder with revulsion, Russian propaganda has mapped two directions for its offensive:

A) No atrocities against civilians have been committed in the Ukraine and B) if they have been, it was the Ukrainians themselves who either staged or committed them to cast Russia in a bad light.

Such are the main themes, but there are quite a few variations, depending on the nature of the atrocity and the amount of evidence available. That stands to reason: a practised liar won’t put all the dregs into the same casket.

The best propagandists are flexible. When one line doesn’t seem to work, they smoothly segue into another. And if the two lines say diametrically opposite things, that’s not a problem either.

If both lines are patently ridiculous, then, according to Dr Goebbels, so much the better. After all, the more ridiculous, the more believable, as far as he was concerned.

In one of his essays, George Orwell showed that in reality things are more subtle than that. Totalitarians say verifiably idiotic things not because they expect everyone to believe them, but because they can force most people to pretend they believe. A barefaced lie can thus hit two targets: persuade the credulous masses and suppress the incredulous few.

Dr Goebbels also taught, and one should always listen to experts, that such outdated notions as truth and falsehood have no place in the flowering field of propaganda. Statements are divided into effective and ineffective, not true and false.

The most outrageous lie will eventually ring true if repeated often enough. And if some bloody-minded elements still insist on demurring obdurately, well, that’s what prisons and execution cellars are for.

While the world was still trying to collect itself after watching the pictures of the Bucha horrors, two Russian rockets hit the railway station in Kramatorsk, killing 50 on the spot (five of them children) and wounding hundreds more. Considering that many of the wounded had limbs blown off, the death count will creep up.

At first, the Russian propagandists responded with a variation on Point A) above. Civilians, what civilians? The Ukies had concentrated their troops at the Kramatorsk station, making it a legitimate military target.

However, Ukrainian authorities then produced enough photographs of mangled civilian bodies to fill a whole library of albums. Not a problem. Push the button for Point B).

So fine, some civilians got killed. But it’s not the Russians who did it. It’s the bloodthirsty Ukie Nazis who are “hitting their own”. Why would they do an awful thing like that? Need you ask? To blame the murders on Russia, thereby turning the whole world against her.

Reading both official and unofficial reports coming out of Russia, I get the impression that a majority of the population are happily swallowing Points A) and B), singly or together. How big a majority, I don’t know. The estimates I’ve seen range from 60 to 90 per cent. Either way, that’s enough to congratulate Putin’s Goebbelses on a job well done.

Those Russians who know both points for the barefaced lies they are, also know that sharing that understanding publicly could earn them up to 15 years in prison. And that’s if they survive the arrest and interrogation techniques for which Col. Putin’s sponsoring organisation is so widely celebrated. Hence, a few heroes apart, they keep shtum.

Most Westerners, on the other hand, haven’t yet been sufficiently brainwashed, or rather brain-amputated, to accept fascist propaganda at face value. Hence Western collaborators with Russian fascism need to couch their lies in disclaimers, such as ‘probably’, ‘I suspect’, ‘allegedly’ and so on.

Such people can’t use MI5 to make people pretend they believe unalloyed lies. Hence they have to confer an air of verisimilitude on their propaganda, an annoying requirement Dr Goebbels didn’t have to satisfy.

But they still follow his prescriptions to the letter: it’s not only all learning that repetition is the mother of. Repetition can also beget propaganda efficacy.

Today Rod Liddle has decided to provide reinforcements for Peter Hitchens’s mostly singlehanded fight for the glory of Russian fascism. Writing in The Times with his usual flippancy, Liddle offered his admiring readers this statement:  

“My suspicion, for what it’s worth, is that there was a massacre carried out in Bucha by Russian forces – but I do not believe it as an article of faith and it’s not outside the realms of possibility that we are all being skilfully manipulated by the plucky Ukrainians.”

One has to admire craft, however misapplied. Liddle suspects “it’s not outside the realms of possibility” that everything Putin’s Goebbelses have been hammering into the Russians’ encephalectomied heads is true.

It’s possible, though Liddle graciously acknowledges not quite certain, that those Ukie Nazis are torturing, raping, looting and murdering thousands of their own people just to paint Putin black, or rather brown. And if you happen to reject this unquestionably plausible explanation, you are a zealot irrationally upholding “an article of faith”.

Liddle’s paragraph has 49 words, which amazingly is enough space not only to serve full-strength Kremlin propaganda, but also to dilute it with five disclaimers, making the cocktail more attractive but just as intoxicating. If for some reason The Times doesn’t work out, RT will always find room for skilful scribes like Rod.

Now reinforcements have arrived, Hitchens has pushed on with renewed vigour. This time around he presented fascist propaganda in a Q&A format, so familiar to former pupils and students.

It’s in this format that, following Goebbels’s instructions, Hitchens regurgitates the same Kremlin lies he has repeated, faithfully and monotonously, since the Ukraine became independent.

By a laudable exercise of willpower, this once he doesn’t describe all Ukrainians as Nazis and the Maidan Revolution as a putsch. But he again repeats something he has said a thousand times if he has said it once.

There are only two reasons for the current war. First, it’s the plight “of Ukraine’s Russian-speaking citizens”. Second, it’s the eastward expansion of Nato.

Both are lies, but frankly I lack Hitchens’s monomaniacal persistence and stamina. And that’s what it would take for me to debunk these lies for the umpteenth time. So please act as my co-author, or research consultant if you’d rather, and look up the dozens of pieces I, or other commentators free of pro-fascist bias, have written on this subject.

Yet one tack Hitchens has tried this time is new, at least to me. All the same techniques I’ve mentioned before are here in evidence, although Hitchens lacks Liddle’s lightness of touch:

“Q. Is Russia alone in committing alleged atrocities in Ukraine?

“A. No. More than one allegation has been made, supported by apparent video evidence, of Ukrainian soldiers killing or maiming captured and helpless Russian prisoners of war. It must be stressed that these claims have not been proven. 

“However, it is incontestable that both Russian and Ukrainian forces were guilty of military actions leading to the deaths of civilians, including children, during the war which has raged since 2014 in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions.”

Do you share my admiration for the clever tricks? I have the same admiration for Hitchens’s swindles that architecture students feel for Albert Speer’s designs. Never mind the ideology, they say, feel the mastery.

I too have heard rumours that Ukrainians sometimes kill Russian POWs. Since, using Hitchens’s jargon, such “allegations… have not been proven”, it would be wise not to comment until they have been. If they were indeed proven, I’d be appalled. But I wouldn’t be surprised.

Killing an invader’s POWs is a disgusting act – but far lower on the scale of monstrosity than the invader murdering thousands of civilians and wiping whole cities off the map. A Ukrainian soldier shooting a prisoner might have had his child killed by a Russian bomb, his wife raped and murdered by Russian troops, his house turned to rubble by Russian artillery.

None of this is an excuse, but all of it is an explanation.

I’d like to think that my age, experience and – above all – Christian faith would stop me from responding in a similarly murderous way to similar crimes. But when I was as young as those Ukrainian soldiers, I suspect I would have been guided not so much by the Sermon on the Mount as by the Old Testament’s “an eye for an eye”.

This is, if I so say myself who shouldn’t, a civilised way of responding to such appalling rumours. But it’s not the way of a committed fascist propagandist.

Hitchens’s thesis, easily discernible behind his hackery, is that it’s mostly the Ukraine, acting as the West’s proxy, that’s to blame for the war. Before Bucha, he denied that Russia bore any guilt at all. Now he grudgingly admits that perhaps Putin’s lads have overreacted to the severe provocation.

But what do you expect? After all, a “war… has raged since 2014 in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions.”

There has been no war there since 2014. In 2014, Putin’s fascist regime committed the first act of its aggression against the Ukraine by occupying a part of Donbass. Hitchens again recycles here the Kremlin’s lie about the abuse of Russian speakers in the Ukraine.

It takes amorality of Hitlerite proportions to claim that “both Russian and Ukrainian forces were guilty of military actions leading to the deaths of civilians, including children”, thereby implying that both sides share the guilt equally, especially the Ukraine.

I wonder how long it will be before our papers stop providing space for fascist propaganda. Never, would be my guess. It’s much easier to hide behind the wall of free speech.

Yes, but what if the speech isn’t free? What if it’s part of Putin’s hybrid war on the West? Such questions can’t be answered if asked. But no one ever asks them.

The presidential election comes this Sunday, and I’m watching Marine Le Pen’s steady climb up the polls with trepidation. Putin is watching too, I’m sure, but with delight, not trepidation. Marine is his second-best woman in the West, after Angie Merkel.

Should Le Pen and Macron end up in the runoff, which is almost certain, the surveys are showing them neck and neck. If Macron loses, this will be the greatest (alas, far from only) damage he will have caused to France and the West.

Le Pen has learned to tone down her faschisoid diatribes, but that leopardess is still sporting the same spotted pelt she inherited from her father. Yet she is boxing clever, which is more than one can say for Manny Macron.

Unlike Manny, who puffs up his cheeks and goes out to play world statesman under Brigitte’s watchful eye. Marine is focusing on domestic issues: energy prices, declining standard of living, dearer food.

That’s a more direct route to Frenchmen’s hearts, which are often synchronised with their stomachs. Still, I do hope, without much confidence, that voters will balk at the prospect of a fascisoid France collaborating with fascist Russia.

That was another part of her rhetoric that Marine has turned down a bit to make herself more electable. Thus, she mildly disapproves of the invasion of the Ukraine, stressing general humanitarian objections to war as such.

Yet she keeps insisting that the Russians aren’t responsible for whatever atrocities have been perpetrated in the Ukraine. Since atrocities have been demonstrably committed by someone, Le Pen implicitly gives credence to the Kremlin’s lies about Ukrainians murdering their own civilians to besmirch Russia’s spotless reputation.

Putin, according to Le Pen, is a great friend of France, which presumably means she doesn’t consider France a Western country. If she does, she should cast an eye over Putin’s speeches, where hatred for the West drips from every word.

And of course Putin isn’t a dictator, insists Le Pen. After all, he was democratically elected.

In other words, the woman who intends to lead one of the world’s greatest countries believes that a democratic election is a panacea against dictatorship. Democratically elected Messrs Hitler, Perón, Mugabe, Lukashenko, Ahmadinejad, Yanukovych and Macîas Nguema (who gratefully murdered a third of the population of Equatorial Guinea that had voted him in) beg to differ.

But even assuming Le Pen’s professed worship at the altar of the ballot box is justified, surely she doesn’t think Putin won any elections fair and square? For one thing, all the mainstream mass media in Russia are nothing but loudspeakers for Putin’s propaganda, and have been for 20 years.

And then there are little peccadilloes, like stuffing ballot boxes, keeping some candidates from standing, voter intimidation and some creative accounting when it comes to the final count. All these are amply documented, photographed and commented on. If Le Pen still thinks Russian elections are democratic, her definition of democracy differs from everyone else’s.

In fact, she genuinely likes Putin’s approach to governance and international relations. This is something she’ll do her utmost to emulate or at least to support, given the chance – if only to keep Putin sweet.

I spoke to a high-ranking French government official the other day, and he denied, rather condescendingly, that Putin is Le Pen’s paymaster. “What about the 11 million euros she got from Putin for her last campaign?” I asked.

“Oh well,” he explained in the tone of a schoolmaster talking to a particularly slow pupil, “that was merely a loan.” “Which she has since repaid?” “Well, no. But all French banks had refused to finance her campaign. What was she supposed to do?”

Why, ask the chap who threatens to destroy the West in a nuclear holocaust, of course. If he had turned her down, there was always Kim to go to. And Mugabe was still alive then. Too bad Pol Pot was no longer around.

Regular visitors to this space know that I’m not Manny Macron’s most ardent fan. And, whenever a general election comes around in a major country, I always talk about the evil of two lessers. The choices are never good these days.

However, I do hope that French voters will sense that the evil of the lesser called Marine Le Pen is far, far greater. France already had one collaborationist regime in her modern history. God save her – and all of us – from another.

The full phrase, De mortius nil nisi bonum, is usually translated as “Speak no ill of the dead”, a commandment that has always struck me as odd.

The parallel phrase, De mortius aut bene, aut nihil (“Of the dead, either well or nothing”) is odder still – especially when the dead in question are wicked public figures who have left their footprint on history.

Saying either nice things or nothing about them means falsifying history, either by omission or by commission. Mercifully, commentators tend to ignore this injunction – as shall I, when writing about Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who has died at age 75.

Our papers are full of obituaries written by people who aren’t guided by the two Latin phrases either. Their articles correctly identify Zhirinovsky as a fascist, his Liberal Democratic Party as a misnomer, and his personal demeanour as vile and clownish.

Avoiding thereby one falsifying pitfall, they stumble into another, by misreading the role Zhirinovsky so brilliantly played in Russian politics for over 30 years. Above all, they don’t realise that throughout his career Zhirinovsky never uttered a single word he wasn’t ordered to utter by the KGB/FSB, nor has he ever performed a single revolting antic, without a direct order from that sinister organisation.

One can sympathise with the obituarists. It’s hard for good Western people to understand the inner workings of evil regimes, especially those as secretive as Russia.

For example, The Times obituarist thus describes Zhirinovsky’s young years: “He studied at Moscow University where he learnt languages including English, German and Turkish, and then worked in Turkey as a translator.”

Any Russian of a certain age and education would instantly read the signs escaping Western observers. No graduate of Moscow University’s Institute of Eastern Languages could be posted to a ‘capitalist’ country (‘capcountry’ in our jargon), as a translator – especially if his CV was marred by Jewish ancestry.

He could only be posted there as a KGB spy under translator’s cover. And it was for espionage that Zhirinovsky was subsequently expelled from Turkey, which partly explains the particularly venomous hatred he always felt for the Turks and everyone resembling them facially.

“In the early 1970s he did military service in the Caucasus,” continues the obituary. As what, an infantry grunt? In fact, Zhirinovsky served as a political officer, meaning a KGB overseer of army units.

It was his sponsoring organisation that manufactured his political career that started during the chaotic interregnum of the early nineties. The éminence grise of Russian politics at the time, KGB four-star general Filip Bobkov, oversaw the transition of power from the Party to the KGB, and he infiltrated KGB reserve officers into every Russian institution.

Zhirinovsky’s party was one child sired by that underappreciated figure. Its role was to play the official bogeyman, a manifestly evil, fascist organisation deflecting public fury from the real powers that be.

With every seemingly insane pronouncement, every brutish act, every drunken escapade, Zhirinovsky was effectively saying to the people: “This is what you’ll get if you don’t support [the KGB’s chosen figurehead of the moment, be it Gorbachev, Yeltsyn or Putin].”

Yet many Russians wanted to get just that, a strong, faschisoid leader venting their own xenophobia, imperial ambitions, a sense of inferiority, disdain for the basic civilities of life – above all their frustration at what they saw as Russia’s humiliation at the hands of the West.

That’s why Zhirinovsky’s party attracted millions of votes at every election, polling at various times between 10 and 25 per cent of the electorate. His hysterical, hateful, spittle-spattering, vodka-fuelled diatribes tickled the nerve endings of many Russians in a peculiar way, only describable in the terms of social psychology or, in this case, psychiatry.

Little capers, such as brawling in parliament, punching a female deputy, throwing a glass of juice into an opponent’s face, public swearing to the full capacity of the unmatched Russian lexicon, would each be sufficient to end any political career in a civilised country. Yet Zhirinovsky thrived.

I remember watching a home video of his rant about Condoleezza Rice, then US Secretary of State. Zhirinovsky was flanked by two athletic bodyguards, as drunk as he was (if reliable rumours are to be believed, it wasn’t just their professional competence that attracted him).

He was screaming foul invective, calling Miss Rice “a nigger slag” and inviting her to visit Spetsnaz barracks, where she would be “gangbanged until soldierly sperm will be coming out of her ears”. I am sure Miss Rice didn’t take that charming invitation, but Zhirinovsky’s viewers took the hint: nothing was off limits when the West was in the rhetorical crosshairs.

With the advent of Putin, electoral politics lost whatever little meaning they had hitherto had. The FSB was in full control, and only Putin’s sense of operating procedure kept his share of the vote under the 105 per cent customary under Stalin. Hence Zhirinovsky’s role changed.

He began to prime the public for the advent of the policy brewing in the bubbling cauldrons of the Kremlin’s inner sanctum. Outside observers didn’t realise that his new-style rants, although still hysterical and foul, were statements of Putin’s geopolitical aspirations.

Zhirinovsky was saying in public what Putin was at the time saying in private only. Zhirinovsky wasn’t extemporising. He was simply jumping the gun he knew was going to be fired soon.

As ordered, he began to ratchet up his anti-Western invective, making good Western people wince at such crudeness. They failed to realise that Zhirinovsky was enunciating the actual battle plan, which at the time still couldn’t be revealed in a language of realpolitik.

It was all there: Russia must fulfil her historical destiny by claiming what’s rightfully hers. The former Soviet republics, that goes without saying. But also, given half the chance, every erstwhile possession of the Russian Empire, including Poland and Finland.

That was to be followed by what the title of Zhirinovsky’s book identified as The Last Thrust Southwards, the conquest of Turkey and then everything all the way to the Indian Ocean. The West could be scared off with nuclear war, and it’s so decadent and cowardly that it would scare easily.

This is how Zhirinovsky put it in 2015: “One sharp shout from Moscow, and that’s it. Nato would be disbanded in 24 hours because otherwise all Nato capitals would be destroyed. They’d give it a think and say, ‘Fine, we’ll disband Nato to stay alive, to keep having fun…’ The Russian flag must be raised everywhere where the Russian army has ever been.”

Considering that the Russian army had been in such places as Paris and Berlin, the West should have heeded those words as a fair warning. Yet our politicians kept talking about understanding Russia’s hurt and resetting the mechanism of compassionate friendship and mutual cooperation.

They didn’t know the language Zhirinovsky spoke. When he talked about using giant fans to blow radioactive waste into the Baltics, they thought they were dealing with a madman. In fact, that was a metaphorical statement of actual policy, driven by hatred for Russia’s former colonies trying to break free.

Zhirinovsky was merely following orders. He was told to march half a step in front of the propaganda troops, leading the way and shining a floodlight on the pathway of advance. And sure enough, everything he said they repeated after an increasingly shorter delay.

Then Putin himself began to say the same things and in similarly elevated tones. And still the West took such pronouncements for mere bluster. It was all strictly for internal consumption, wrote our commentators. Putin would be crazy to act on his threats, and we know for a fact he is perfectly sane.

Zhirinovsky was consistently dismissed as a ‘clown prince’, a jester to the court of the strong leader we wished we had. That was music to his masters’ ears: their agent had played his part to perfection. The marks had swallowed the bait.

Away from the public eye, Zhirinovsky wasn’t at all the frenzied, half-crazy demagogue we saw on TV screens. A friend of mind, a New York journalist who was Zhirinovsky’s classmate at university, had many meetings with him in Moscow and interviewed him several times.

He told me Zhirinovsky was sensible, humorous and well-behaved in private, a far cry from his public shenanigans. That tallied with many other similar reports I’ve since heard, the last one from a former French ambassador who knew Zhirinovsky professionally. No wonder. Zhirinovsky was a master of KGB tradecraft.

Last December Zhirinovsky predicted the invasion of the Ukraine, and was only two days off in specifying its date. His seemingly insane rants became Russia’s actions – Putin tossed off the mask of a world statesman and unfurled the banner of naked fascist aggression.

The curtain fell; Zhirinovsky’s role was written out of the play. He was no longer needed. So he died, unlamented and – in the West – never properly understood.    

If you expect me to write something today, sorry. I’ll be acting mostly as translator, for Russia has announced her war objectives so lucidly and unequivocally that there’s little anyone can add.

For, not after the Wannsee Protocol has any European (or in this case quasi-European) country outlined the desideratum of a Final Solution in so many words, without resorting to subterfuge.

The banner idea was declared by Dmitri Medvedev, Putin’s loyal poodle. It was then fleshed out by RIA (the Russian Information Agency), the government’s mouthpiece.  

So first Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of Russia, formerly her prime minister and president:

“President of Russia Vladimir Putin has firmly set the objective of demilitarising and denazifying the Ukraine. These difficult tasks cannot be carried out instantly. And neither will they be accomplished solely on the battlefields… The ultimate goal is to secure peace for the future generations of the Ukrainians by finally creating an open Eurasia – from Lisbon to Vladivostok.”

The Third Reich, eat your heart out – Hitler had more modest objectives. But what do “demilitarising and denazifying” mean when they are at home? Specifically?

RIA Novosti kindly explains, or rather transmits Putin’s explanation:

“Russia is fighting the West for the future of the world… The Ukraine has become the West’s tool for reshaping the world.”

Therefore, “All war criminals and active Nazis must suffer an exemplary and widely publicised punishment. A total purge must be carried out…

“However, it’s not just the leaders but also a significant part of the people who are passive Nazis, Nazi collaborators. They supported the Nazi regime and kowtowed to it. Just punishment of this part of the population is only achievable by inflicting the unavoidable hardships of a just war against the Nazi system…

“Any further denazification of this part of the population will consist of re-education, to be achieved by an ideological repression (suppression) of Nazi ideas and by strict censorship: not only in the sphere of politics but also definitely in the sphere of culture and education…  

“Hence the denazified country cannot remain sovereign. The denazifying state – Russia – cannot practise a liberal approach to denazification. [Could have fooled me – AB]. The denazifier’s ideology shall not be contested by the guilty party to be denazified…

“The collective West is itself the designer, source and sponsor of Ukrainian Nazism.

“The name ‘Ukraine’ clearly cannot be preserved as the designation of any completely denazified polity on the territory liberated from Nazism… The newly created people’s republics… cannot in reality be neutral – the guilt of treating Russia as an enemy can only be redeemed by depending on Russia for reconstruction, rebirth and development.

“No ‘Marshall Plans’ can be allowed in these lands. There can be no ideological or political ‘neutrality’ in any practical sense compatible with denazification. The personnel and organisations acting as instruments of denazification cannot succeed without Russia’s direct help, both military and organisational.

“Denazification will inevitably also become a de-Ukrainisation… As history has shown, the Ukraine cannot exist as a nation state, and any attempt to ‘build’ one ineluctably leads to Nazism.

“Historical experience shows that wartime tragedies and dramas ultimately benefit the nations seduced and tempted to act as Russia’s enemies. [I’m sure the surviving Bucha residents will take much solace in this – AB]

“The ‘Catholic province’ (the five regions of Western Ukraine) is unlikely to join the pro-Russian areas. The demarcation line will be established empirically. Lying beyond it will be a neutral and demilitarised Ukraine where all the haters of Russia will congregate, but where every formal manifestation of Nazism will be banned. Should these demands not be met, a threat of an immediate resumption of military action will guarantee the neutrality of this rump Ukraine. A permanent Russian military presence may be necessary to ensure this.

“Russia will have no allies in this denazification of the Ukraine. [What, not even North Korea? – AB]. For this is a purely Russian affair. And it is not just the Banderite version of a Nazi Ukraine that will be uprooted, but also and above all Western totalitarianism, the imposed programmes of civilisational degradation and collapse, the mechanisms of subjugation to the superpower of the West and the USA.

“To succeed in carrying out the plan of denazifying the Ukraine, Russia herself will have to abandon for ever all her pro-European and pro-Western illusions. She will have to perceive herself as the last bulwark of defending and preserving those values of a historical Europe that are deemed worthy and that the West itself has given up.”

I’m sure you don’t need any clarificaction, but I can’t resist adding my penny’s worth. For spelled out here is a genocidal plan to exterminate most Ukrainians, while enslaving and Russifying the rest.

But Russia also gets the good news: she’ll have to forget any hope of ever becoming a European nation.

And, since a few million Russians do consider themselves culturally European, they too will have to be purged by re-education, exile, imprisonment or – better still – mass extermination. Mein Kampf meets the Wannsee Protocol and the Bolshevik programme of annihilating whole classes.

This is unvarnished fascism and an open declaration of war on the West. If you still doubt that a Third World War is under way, I suggest you re-read the above. And if after that you still love that strong leader Putin, you must be Peter Hitchens.