Blog

No army exists in a vacuum. As a microcosm of the country that sends it out, an army reflects and magnifies the salient features of its society.

That’s why it’s odd that so many commentators seem to be baffled by the two principal traits of the Russian army in the Ukraine: its inhuman brutality towards civilians and its general incompetence.

What else did those hapless commentators expect? Let’s look at those two features in order.

Over the past century (I could go further back, but 100 years seems to be sufficient), the Russians have been on the receiving end of the kind of cruelty that, say, Germans didn’t experience even under Hitler.

The communists murdered some 60 million by bullet, torture, artificial famine or inhuman imprisonment. And the same organisation that was guilty of those crimes took over the country in the late 20^th century — and it’s still in power.

The scale of internal violence dished out by Putin’s regime isn’t quite up to Stalin’s levels, but it’s still appalling by any civilised standard.

Sadistic, sometimes lethal, beatings and torture are commonplace in Russian police stations and prisons. (If you don’t remember the Magnitsky case, look it up). Arrested and imprisoned men are routinely raped with broom handles, truncheons and bottles. (Again, I suggest you look up the clips smuggled out of the Saratov prison.)

Arrests are arbitrary, for the rule of law doesn’t exist in Russia – nor has it ever existed, in the Western sense of the word. Since corruption is pandemic, anyone in a position of responsibility is a hostage to the boss’s good graces. If the boss likes him, he can go on thieving. If the boss wants to send him down, he will.

Any psychologist will tell you that a person growing up in a society characterised by sadism and contempt for the individual is more than likely to dish out what he has been conditioned to take.

And if the whole society is brutal, its army will be even more so. The Russian army has an appalling suicide rate because fresh conscripts are invariably humiliated, beaten and tortured by the ‘elders’ (second-year soldiers), with the officers’ acquiescence. Young lads often mutilate themselves just to escape the unbearable suffering.

A friend of mine served in the 70s. He was bullied so badly that he chopped off three fingers on his left hand, only to be sentenced to five years in prison for it. Nothing has changed since then, not for the better at any rate.

Now those same soldiers, themselves ‘elders’, find themselves in a position of power over helpless civilians. They know they can wield this power as they see fit – their officers aren’t going to stop them, just as they didn’t stop the sadistic torture of the conscripts. All in all, the soldiers have been so thoroughly dehumanised that no natural restraints are putting limits on their behaviour.

They haven’t grown up as free moral agents. Instead, they’ve been locked up in a prison of eternal infantilism, and whatever inchoate sadism is lurking in their heads is encouraged to come out. So they torture, murder and rape, rejoicing in their freedom from grown-up limits. It’s Lord of the Flies all over again, and there are no limits.

Their martial incompetence is just as predictable. Why would the Russian army develop any standards of organisational nous that don’t exist in Russian society? Why do you suppose the country blessed with the greatest natural resources in the world has never been able even to feed its people properly, never mind creating a thriving economy?

A modern army is even more complex an organism than a modern economy. It’s the distillation of the country’s spirit, intellect, character, morale, initiative and managerial talent. If such virtues are lacking in society, they will be absent in the army.

Now Gen. David Petraeus, known to his intimates as ‘Peaches’, says he is bewildered by the muddled performance of the Russian army. I am surprised he is surprised.

The general, who certainly knows what he’s talking about, points out that the Russian troops are unable to perform the “most basic tasks”. What happened to their training?

Troops on the ground aren’t being led by officers in command. Those officers have to wait for instructions from the Kremlin, hundreds of miles away. “Presumably the leaders in Moscow thought they could do a better job,” added the bewildered general.

So what else is new? That’s how the Russian army functioned in the Second World War, which explains why it lost more men than all the other combatants together.

Soviet officers and generals were scared to show any initiative for fear of summary execution. Hence the buck was passed on and on until it ended up in the Kremlin, with Stalin.

At the beginning of the war, the entire high command of the Western Front, starting with the best Soviet tank strategist, Gen. Pavlov, were executed for letting the Germans break through. The cull of generals continued throughout the war, which severely limited their ability to respond rapidly to constantly changing situations.

They knew that if they got it right, they’d get another medal – and if they got it wrong, they’d be shot before the ranks. Is it any wonder that they didn’t so much pass the buck as hurl it all the way to Moscow?

As we go down the organisational structure, exactly the same tendencies were observable. Officers were trained to follow orders and, in the absence of such, to do nothing just in case.

And Russian NCOs weren’t trained at all, that is in anything other than sadistic bullying of the rank-and-file. They too passed the buck to officers, who were insanely numerous.

The Soviet army regulations specified one officer for six privates and NCOs. In the Wehrmacht, the same ratio was one for 29. Their officers knew they could rely on their sergeants; Soviet officers knew they couldn’t.

It was Friedrich Engels who pointed out that the Russian army had never won a battle against a German, French or Polish adversary in conditions of even approximate parity. Had Engels lived another 100 years, he wouldn’t have seen anything to make him change his mind.

Petraeus also pointed out that the Russian troops can’t achieve “combined arms effects”, something that the forces under his command demonstrated so well in Iraq and Afghanistan. This meant they can’t coordinate the action of armour, infantry, artillery and air force to produce the synergy essential for a modern fighting force.

The Ukrainians are better trained and infinitely better motivated. If they were comparably equipped, they’d quickly rout the Russian army. That would probably put paid to Putin’s regime, although I’m not certain it would put paid to Putin’s fascism.

Yet Joe Biden is stubbornly denying the Ukrainians the tanks, planes and AA systems they so badly need. Tanks, explains Biden, are offensive weapons, rather than defensive ones. And the Ukraine is only allowed a defensive war, meaning she has to fight with one arm tied behind her back.

Now, Joe is of course a military strategist of no mean attainment. That’s why he can perceive a clear distinction between offence and defence, which has so far escaped most experts. They still wonder if, say, a counterattack is offence or defence. It could be either or both, depending on how one looks at it.

No such problems for Joe. He has a toggle switch in his mind that clicks to say “thus far, but no farther”. It almost looks as if Biden wants Putin to stay in power to the end of his natural life.

I can only repeat what a frustrated fan shouted at ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson, the baseball player accused of fixing the 1919 World Series: “Say it ain’t so, Joe!”

The chorus of Europeans weeping and wailing over Russian atrocities in the Ukraine is strong enough without my husky voice chiming in. Suffice it to say that I saw it all before, when visiting a Chechen refugee camp on the Dagestan border in 1995.

Dozens of people were bunched up together on mattresses covering the floor of a school. Scabied children were the only people who could still walk easily. Others were too weak from hunger, disease and fatigue to move a muscle. An old woman died in front of my eyes.

Just a few days earlier, the Russians had massacred the village of Samashki, doing exactly what they’ve now done in Bucha and elsewhere in the Ukraine. Just like Bucha today, Samashki made the news then, but it wasn’t the only massacre, nor probably the worst one.

The refugee told me stories of the Russians routinely shooting every man and raping every woman in the places they occupied. In one village they loaded a helicopter with as many villagers as could fit in, then threw them out at 1,000 feet. When one woman on the ground cried too loudly, a Russian soldier fired an AK burst across her legs.

Another woman, blinded by a flash grenade, begged me to tell my people everything when I went back to England. I promised I would, and kept my promise as best I could – knowing in advance the sheer futility of such efforts.

That was under Yeltsyn’s government, seen in the West as a history-ending liberal democracy. Four years later, the perpetually drunk president appointed Putin as his successor, and Russia embarked on a gradual but accelerating progress towards full-fledged fascism. Hence, doing some quick mental arithmetic, I multiply what I saw in Chechnya, 1995, by ten to get a reliable picture of the Ukraine, 2022.

I used the word ‘fascism’ in its technical meaning, not as a multi-purpose term of abuse. For details, may I refer you in a shamefully self-serving way to a talk I gave some seven years ago: http://www.alexanderboot.com/russian-fascists-and-british-conservatives/

My ‘conservative’ listeners were unconvinced then, and I’m sure they still are, no matter how many Ukrainian civilians end up with a bullet in the base of the skull. But I hope they’ll have the honesty to admit to themselves that, fundamentally, they see nothing wrong with fascism, provided it’s clouded in the smokescreen of conservative-sounding shibboleths.

And I also hope they’ll have the modicum of intelligence, integrity and education not to repeat the blithering idiocy uttered by the leaders of the main EU parliamentary parties in their address to the Russians.

Seldom does one see such a statement of craven surrender justified by bone-crushing ignorance. The message is that “we are all Europeans” and “no one wishes Russia ill”. Hence we should combine our efforts to stop the war and bring about “that long-awaited day when we can all be together again.”

Never mind the sheer immorality and vacuity it takes to utter such empty bien pensant phrases at a time when civilians are being tortured and massacred by an evil regime.

What I find especially incredible is the aesthetic aspect of it. Yes, I know those people have neither intelligence nor character. But at least I hoped, forlornly as it turns out, that they’d have the taste not to indulge their natural cowardly instincts at a time like this.

And, of course, they had to reiterate Biden’s open-ended vow never even to contemplate stopping Putin’s fascism by force. “No Nato army,” said those ‘leaders’, “American or European, has ever entered, not will ever enter, Russia.”

That statement alone shows that, no matter how this war ends, fascism will triumph. For Putin and his clique have been issued blanket guarantees of impunity. So even if they have to retreat, lick their wounds and regroup, they’ll strike again later, this time upping the stakes.

The concluding statement of this shameful document deserves to be quoted in full. It’s staggering in its ignorance, especially since most of its authors must have gone to decent schools and some might even have attended university:

“We are all Europeans, from Dublin to Vladivostok, because our destinies have always been intertwined, and your writers – Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and Bulgakov – belong to our common heritage. We are all Europeans because we derive our common culture from Greek philosophy, Roman legality, Old and New Testaments, the Enlightenment, and the Athenian and Roman democracy reshaped by the English and French revolutions… So let us join our efforts to put an immediate end to this macabre period of our lives and to usher in the day when your Federation and our Union, with its present and future members, will find a way towards mutual understanding and cooperation so necessary for Europe and the whole world.”

To paraphrase Mary McCarthy’s pithy dismissal of Lillian Hellman, every word written here is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.

With the partial exception of Greek philosophy and the Bible, none of the cited roots of “our common heritage” have anything to do with Russian cultural history – and even those exceptions never affected Russian civilisation, such as it is.

The writers mentioned do indeed belong to European culture, but then so do at least half a dozen Japanese writers I could think of offhand. So are the Japanese Europeans too?

However, even discounting that, mentioning Dostoyevsky in this context is peculiar. The writer was a Russian supremacist, who despised and hated the West with unmitigated passion. His particularly venomous loathing was reserved for the Catholics and the Jews, but no other groups in the West were exempt.

Those EU ignoramuses ought to read Dostoyevsky’s Diaries of a Writer and his poems to see if they find any protestations of affection for “Athenian and Roman democracy reshaped by the English and French revolutions”. They won’t.

What they are guaranteed to find is a jingoist animus against Europe, including England, a thinly disguised longing for the extermination of Jews, and countless references to Russia as a spiritual, God-bearing nation entitled to conquer her neighbours and educate them in the ways of the world.

Neither was Tolstoy conspicuously affected by all those wonderful European things, with the possible exception of Greek philosophy.

He was militantly anti-Christian (to the point of actually being excommunicated, which even Lenin wasn’t), and his religious feelings gravitated not westwards, but towards the East, especially the Indian subcontinent. Tolstoy had nothing but contempt for Western legality and parliamentarism, which sentiments were dialectically linked with his worship of the saintly Russian peasant, beautiful in his anarchic anomie.

Hence that EU epistle to the Russians is ignorant even on its own puny terms. As to their hope that one day “your Federation and our Union” will live in peace and harmony, it’s simply beneath contempt on every level: intellectual, moral and political.

Much more appropriate would be a breast-beating mea culpa, for it’s mostly Europe’s greed and cowardice that made Putin’s fascism possible. And the EU continues to finance it by paying hundreds of millions for Russian gas every day.

How much more “mutual understanding and cooperation” do they want? Perhaps giving Russia the same heavy weapons denied to the Ukraine would do the trick.

If you want to understand Putin’s Russia, don’t think Europe. Think Rwanda. Or, if you prefer the historical perspective favoured by the EU, the Golden Horde.

“I once again find myself on the despised, hated and reviled side of the argument,” writes Peter Hitchens. He must have looked in the mirror and seen a courageous maverick doing battle for unpopular truth.

That mirror distorts reality. For Hitchens is nothing but a conduit for enemy propaganda, which these days he doesn’t even bother to paraphrase.

“This is not a war between Ukraine and Russia. It is a war between the USA and Russia,” he writes. A daring line, that, if somewhat lacking in novelty appeal.

I’ve read, seen and heard it repeated in the Russian media countless times since 2014. Putin has consistently denied that the Ukraine acted of her own accord when opting for independence.

Those neo-Nazi Ukies were egged on by America, because, explains Hitchens, since 1992 “Washington has wanted to crush any revival of Russian power.”

If so, Washington could be forgiven. After all, during the previous 40 years “Russian power” had kept the world trembling on the edge of a nuclear holocaust.

However, if that indeed was Washington’s aim, it certainly went about achieving it in an odd way. Untold billions in US, and generally Western, investments poured into Russia, with a massive transfer of technology following in its wake.

Without it, Russia would indeed be what an American journalist once described as “Upper Volta with nukes.” Replace, as a bow to geographical gerrymandering, Upper Volta with Burkina Faso, and the description would still apply – but for the West’s acquiescence in the rise of Russian fascism.

Every piece of high-tech equipment in Russia has either been imported from the West or at least depends partly or wholly on Western components. This goes for the whole range of products, from computers and TV sets to ICBMs and warplanes.

Putin and his henchmen are driven in Mercedes limousines, not the Ladas available to hoi-polloi. And even those automotive answers to Chernobyl are manufactured at the plant built by Fiat in the late 1960s.

The blackmail weapon that goes by the name of Russian oil and gas industry would have no ammunition without American technology. Exploration and drilling equipment, gas-lift and other extraction systems, pipeline controls, electronic management all come courtesy of Western, mostly US, companies.

Rather than trying to “crush the revival of Russian power”, the West has gone to criminal lengths building it up. But propaganda isn’t about facts, is it?

Taking his cue from the Kremlin, Hitchens simply rehashes the mandated line: the Ukraine isn’t a free agent. She is America’s proxy, and, by murdering, raping and looting Ukrainian civilians, Russia is actually fighting the dastardly Yankees.

Hitchens also has an issue with Britain: “We pour in more weapons and shout encouragement from a safe distance.” How much better it would be if we stopped those supplies and let Putin take over the Ukraine. That would instantly solve her real problems:

“What Ukraine actually needs is action to cure its festering, universal corruption. It would also benefit from the pushing to the margins of the ultra-nationalist fanatics who have far too much influence in its government and armed forces. The war will make these problems worse, not better.”

First, the Ukraine didn’t start the war hoping thereby to rise to Hitchens’s lofty moral standards. She didn’t start it at all; Russia did. Or, if you believe Hitchens, it was actually America that provoked Russia into precipitate action.

The rest of that passage comes straight out of Kremlin briefings, starting with the Ukraine’s “festering, universal corruption”. Corruption does exist in the Ukraine, as some members of the Biden family can confirm. But it’s not even remotely as festering and universal as in Russia, whose regime is formed by history’s unique fusion of secret police and organised crime.

It’s true, however, that Kremlin Goebbelses are encouraged to emulate a thief who runs away from his pursuers, screaming “Stop thief!” louder than anyone else. By the looks of it, that order is obeyed not only by the Goebbelses, but also by the Lord Haw-Haws.

The same goes for the line about “the ultra-nationalist fanatics”. I can only quote the numbers I’ve quoted before: said fanatics garner a mere three per cent of the Ukrainian vote. Similar groups in Russia collectively poll over 20 per cent.

Even though such groups do exist in the Ukraine (as they do almost everywhere), they’ve partly redeemed themselves by their self-sacrificial heroism over the past six weeks.

For example, the notorious Azov Battalion was indeed fascisoid before the war. Its members were often photographed making inappropriate salutes against the backdrop of inappropriate flags.

They aren’t doing it now. Those youngsters are heroically defending Mariupol, trying to save at least some of its denizens from annihilation.

In addition to going about their military duties, the Azov fighters ring children with their own bodies to shield them from murderous fire. They risk (and lose) their own lives trying to save civilians from the ruins of bombed buildings about to collapse. And they do so without first securing the upper tiers with cables and winches, of which they have none.

Does this strike you as Nazi behaviour? And which side is fascist here?

Again Hitchens is loyally recycling the Kremlin line about denazifying the Ukraine. And what better way of achieving this laudable outcome than by bombing hospitals and kindergartens, torturing and executing civilians at will, looting and raping a swathe through the country?   

Then comes that old chestnut about Putin being provoked by Nato’s expansion, especially by “the taunting of Russia by President George W. Bush’s 2008 suggestion that Ukraine should actually join Nato… when Putin was still more or less open to reason”.

So was it more or less? If you read Hitchens’s own effluvia from that period, Putin was more than just open to reason. He had turned Russia into “the most conservative and Christian country in Europe”. Yet if you simply study history, you’ll find that Putin’s regime was every bit as fascist then as it is now.

Putin came to power by the expedient of blowing up apartment blocks in Moscow and elsewhere, killing more than 300 and injuring more than 1,000. That was blamed on Chechnya, which enabled Putin to consolidate his power by doing to that breakaway republic exactly what he is doing to the Ukraine now.

A year before Mr Bush’s infuriating suggestion, Putin brought nuclear war to London, where his hitmen poisoned Alexander Litvinenko (a British subject) with polonium in Grosvenor Square. It was a miracle that Litvinenko was the only one to die.

A massive cull of Russia’s own journalists had been going full pelt for years before Mr Bush spoke out of turn. For example, Putin, still “open to reason”, had the journalist Ivan Safronov defenestrated in 2007 for investigating the sale of Russian arms to Iran and Syria.

It’s the ever-increasing threat of “Russian power” that made Eastern European countries, including the Ukraine, seek the protection of Nato membership. Contrary to what Hitchens and his Kremlin ventriloquists claim, those long-suffering countries had every right to do so – and, as the current events prove, every reason.

Naturally, Hitchens’s piece wouldn’t have been complete without his rehashing the Kremlin mantra about the 2014 “mob putsch which overthrew Ukraine’s legitimate President Viktor Yanukovych… This putsch was the true beginning of the war now raging, the initial act of violence which triggered everything else.”

The word ‘putsch’ harmonises neatly with Hitchens’s Kremlin-inspired motif of the Ukraine being a Nazi state. In fact, the Maidan Revolution overthrew a Putin puppet to claim real, as opposed to bogus, independence.

Yanukovych was a career criminal who in his impetuous youth had served two prison terms for robbery and assault. When that worthy individual rose to power, he became largely responsible for fostering the very corruption that so upsets Hitchens.

That thug himself lived in a palace with a private zoo, taking lifestyle tips from his Kremlin masters. When the people finally rose against Yanukovych, he had his police kill dozens of demonstrators and then fled to Russia, begging Putin to intervene militarily.

Putin obliged, and days later Russia invaded the Ukraine for the first time. Yanukovych wasn’t reinstated though, and in 2019 a Ukrainian court found him guilty of treason (in absentia).

It’s useful to remember, that, unlike their Russian equivalents, Ukrainian courts are independent and Ukrainian elections are verifiably honest. The country has a long way to go before she shakes the Soviet dust off her feet, but at least she is making a real effort.

The American goal, “the elimination of Russia as a major country”, may well be achieved, moans Hitchens. But “someone had better be careful about what happens to all its nuclear weapons if that comes to pass.”

This is an enunciation of Putin’s nuclear threat, as expressed both by him and his henchmen thousands of times. But Hitchens ought to pay attention in class: Putin promises a nuclear inferno to prevent “the elimination of Russia as a major country”, not to avenge that tragedy.

In any case, forget Russia. It’s China that’s the real threat. Her “police state… grows in strength and power, biding its time.”

So the man does pay attention to the Kremlin’s briefings. The odd lapse here and there notwithstanding, Hitchens is a conscientious pupil. He also knows how to add a touch of verisimilitude to his lies.

China is indeed a police state, and it’s indeed a factor of strategic danger. But alas, the West is threatened from more than one direction. It takes a warped or else mendacious logic to maintain that, because China is a threat, Russia isn’t.

In fact, that’s what Putin’s useful idiots in the West have been shouting for years, trying to divert attention from the rise of expansionist Russian fascism. Persisting with that ruse now, when thousands of Ukrainians are being massacred and the very system of European security is creaking at the seams, betokens staggering immorality.

Or else treason. Wars have always been fought not only with guns but also with words, now more than ever. Warring parties seek to undermine each other’s resolve by carpet-bombing whole populations with propaganda.

I find it hard to understand why a wielder of such weapons within our own country is less of an enemy than the monster who threatens to turn the West into “radioactive dust”, to quote one of Hitchens’s Russian colleagues.

Since Britain isn’t at war with Russia de jure, there are no legal grounds for charging Hitchens with treason. But since Russia is waging de facto war on Britain, along with what’s left of the civilised world, there is every justification for cutting off his access to mass media.

For Hitchens isn’t supporting any side in any argument. His weekly articles are enemy action. Pure and simple.

Not according to Gérard Depardieu, French actor and Russian citizen. “The Russian people are not responsible for the crazy, unacceptable excesses of their leaders like Vladimir Putin,” he said.

Old Gérard received his Russian passport in 2013, from Putin personally. The two men hugged and kissed (no tongues, I believe), with Depardieu describing Putin’s fiefdom as a “great democracy.”

When the great democracy pounced on Ukrainian territory in 2014, the nouveau Russian Gérard saw nothing wrong with that. Then again, even as a young man, Depardieu was regarded even by his fellow actors as daft, which is no mean achievement considering the overall intellectual standard of that profession. And that was before a steady diet of five bottles of wine a day made heavy inroads on his meagre mental faculties.

Yet he has clearly retained an ability to find out what the current mots justes are and to regurgitate them to a wide audience. On second thoughts, even more accomplished men than him repeat the same lazy platitude ad infinitum: “The Russian people are just lovely. Shame about Putin though.”

However, it’s not Putin who’s aiming bombs and shells at residential areas. It’s Russian people, serving as pilots or artillery men.

It’s not Putin who’s laughingly shooting civilians, just for the hell of it. It’s Russian people, dressed as soldiers.

It’s not Putin who’s raping Ukrainian women. It’s Russian people, forming raping gangs in the communal spirit of which their nation is so proud.

It’s not Putin who’s looting people’s houses, and, as numerous phone intercepts show, even taking orders from home: “Vania, see if you can score a tape recorder [fur coat, some nice jewellery, camera].”

The grandfathers of these soldiers didn’t have the luxury of non-stop communications with their families. When they looted their way through Eastern Europe and then Germany, they had to rely on their own tastes. Now their descendants can steal to order.

It’s not even Putin who ordered them to murder, maraud and rape – it’s possible no one did. And if some such orders were issued, they came from NCOs, lieutenants, captains – Russian people.

Neither have Putin’s propagandists told them it was fine to murder civilians, then boobytrap their corpses and leave them to rot by the roadside. We’ll come to those infernal propagandists later. But suffice it to say now that none of them is a match for their Stalin equivalent, Ilya Ehrenburg.

When Russian troops were moving into Germany, that future darling of the Soviet intelligentsia was publishing one incendiary article after another, explicitly giving Red Army soldiers a licence to kill, rape and rob civilians.

Since the nation had only been infected with the communist syphilis 14 years before the war started, young Russians still had some decency left, enough to need a ringing endorsement of satanic behaviour from a figure of authority. Today’s lot have been exposed to the same contagion (in different variants) for over a century, so they don’t need anyone’s permission.

The Nuremberg Trials, a travesty of justice though they were in many respects, established a useful legal principle: it’s not only someone who gives a criminal order who commits a crime, but also someone who obeys it.

The same should go for the culpability of both the producers of criminal propaganda and the willing consumers of it. And here we have to go beyond those thousands of Russians who cut a swathe through the Ukraine, murdering, raping and looting. Here we have to talk about the Russian people in general, mutatis mutandis.

This tagged-on disclaimer covers those thousands of heroic Russians who protest against the war, bravely facing police truncheons, torture and possible prison terms. Then there are perhaps a million or two who don’t have the courage to come out, but who do have the mind and moral sense to detest Putin’s regime and everything it represents.

Yet these – and believe me, I hate to be writing this – are only the kind of exceptions that prove the rule. For throughout its history, but especially over the past century, the Russian nation has been not just willing but eager to delegate its mind and moral sense to the Leader, whatever title he holds.

That has wasted the advantage of being fully human – a thinking moral agent endowed with free will. It also precludes any possibility of creating, or even adopting, a true civilisation, as distinct from a loose, herd-like association of dehumanised, brutalised people all too ready both to submit to violence and to mete it out.

As the first Russian philosopher, Chaadayev, wrote almost 200 hundred years ago, “We [the Russians] belong to those who are not an integral part of humanity but exist only to teach the world some type of great lesson.” In how not to do things.

Roughly at the same time, one of Russia’s greatest poets, Lermontov, described Russia as a “land of masters, land of slaves”. Nothing has changed since then, certainly not for the better. And nor does the existence of Chaadayev, Lermontov and a few hundred other great poets, thinkers, novelists and composers disprove the characterisation of Russia as a thoroughly barbaric land, devoid of any civilisational bonds and restraints.

For a culture, defined as something produced for few by fewer, can happily coexist with mass barbarism. One can even go so far as to suggest that culture and civilisation are often antithetical.

Unlike a culture, a civilisation has to include the whole society, not just its intellectual elite. Even people who have no ear for music, no eye for painting, no talent for writing and no brain to think about serious matters independently must still be united by the ethos of their civilisation. That’s its function, which in Russia has always gone begging.

Hence the Russians are so willing to salute any red, brown or black flag run up the pole by evil ghouls. They lack a civilisational cut-off valve to be activated whenever they are exposed to cosmically wicked nonsense.

Hence, when evil men like Putin and his army of propagandists tell them for twenty years, day and night, that they are superior to everyone else not because of any individual achievement, but because they are Russians, they jump up and salute.

When told that, though Ukrainians and Russians are the same, identical people in every respect, the former are creating biological weapons to kill the latter selectively, they believe every word.

When told that Ukrainians must be saved from their Nazi oppressors, they go out to murder Ukrainians and level their cities as a way of saving them.

So yes, the general who orders carpet bombing of a city is guiltier than the pilot who releases the bombs. And those thousands of propagandists who have pumped nothing but poisonous grime into people’s heads, not so much washing their brains as amputating them, are more criminal than a silly lad who believed them. And yes, the butcher in the Kremlin (or rather in the bunker) is the criminal of all criminals.

But if we repeat Depardieu’s drivel about the nasty Putin and gorgeous Russian people, we debauch the very idea of humanity – at least the idea that formed our, great civilisation. The idea that the words ‘human’ and ‘free moral agent’ are synonymous. Fully and invariably.

P.S. -3C and snow in London tonight. Where art thou, global warming?

Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t the food that was hopeless. Like all worthy men, our host did all the cooking, and, like all worthy men, he did it well.

It’s just that somewhere between the roast capon and the cheese board I lost, along with the will to live, whatever little hope I still had for the West. That had to do with the husband and wife eating on either side of me.

During the Medvedev tenure as figurehead president, the man served as ambassador of a major European country to Russia. Now retired from the diplomatic service, he sits on an influential advisory board to his country’s government.

He and his wife both fell in love with Russia, and they even learned its language to a decent standard. Now they were sorry Putin had spoiled what otherwise had been a perfect reign.

My probing questions established that, according to my interlocutors, until 24 February, 2022, Russia had followed an ever-ascending path to democratic virtue. The ex-ambassador couldn’t for the life of him understand why Putin had had to go and mess it all up.

That tragedy had happened all of a sudden, completely unexpected, he said. Well, I had expected it, said I smugly. Just look at Putin’s CV both before and after he assumed power.

“What about it?” “Well, to start with, he is a career KGB officer.” “So? Americans have their CIA, which is just as bad.” “Not quite, I’m afraid. I’m not aware of the CIA murdering millions of their own citizens.” “It was the Communist Party that did that, not the KGB.”

“Now, Putin started his tenure by having several apartment blocks blown up in Moscow and elsewhere. When the tenants were sleeping in their beds.” “It’s not proven Putin had anything to do with it.”

“And then he started the second Chechen war, killing civilians indiscriminately.” “The Chechens are nasty bits of work. They had it coming.”

“Then there was that little matter of Russia attacking Georgia in 2008.” “Russia did nothing of the sort. It was Georgia that attacked Russia.”

“Did the Ukraine also attack Russia in 2014?” “Nobody attacked anyone then. Russia merely claimed what was historically hers, the Crimea.”

“So did all those journalists and politicians murdered by Putin in fact commit suicide?” “Nobody was killed while we were in Moscow.”

At that point I started reeling off the names of Putin’s victims, and a good job I could remember quite a few. Otherwise my interlocutors would have denied everything, like a criminal who refuses to admit to any crimes, other than those the police can prove he committed.

“Politkovskaya?” “Oh yes, I remember now.” “Estremirova?” “Quite, I forgot about her.” “Baburina? Starovoytova? Shchekochikhin? Nemtsov?” And so forth, with each name wrenching reluctant admissions and so-what shrugs. Clearly that litany made no dent in my interlocutors’ affection for President Medvedev and, until 24 February, President Putin.

“But Medvedev was never a real president. He and Putin simply concocted a cynical ploy to bypass Russia’s constitution. Putin had to relinquish the post for a couple of years not to have too many consecutive terms, but he still called all the shots.”

“No, he didn’t. I met Medvedev quite a few times, and he was firmly in charge. And a fine man he was too.”

“He was a KGB thug, just like his master. I once saw a video of a drunk Medvedev ranting about the Arab Spring, saying if he were Mubarak he would have turned it into a nuclear winter. Practically every word was the kind that even my late mother never knew.”

“Impossible. Medvedev doesn’t swear. He has a doctorate in law.”

“So you disagree that Putin and his regime are evil and fascist?” “Of course, I do. He is like any political leader, getting some things right and some others wrong. Once this little conflict is settled, things will go back to normal, and Russia will resume her march to goodness. And in any case, the word ‘evil’ has no use in politics. It’s just too extreme.”

“What about Hitler?” “Well, except him. But you aren’t suggesting Putin is as evil as Hitler?” And so forth, way past the cheese board and even the chocolate mousse (homemade).

Why am I bothering to tell you this story?

Because my (otherwise charming and perfectly civilised) interlocutor embodies within his lofty frame the entire political mainstream of his country and other EU members, at least in the high-rent end of the Union.

They can’t wait for some sort of ceasefire, bogus or otherwise, to go into effect in the Ukraine. Then they’ll be able to race against one another to the honour of being the first to repeal all the sanctions and readmit Putin to… well, any organisation he’ll wish to be readmitted to.

Errare humanum est, and all that. Attacking the Ukraine was a mistake, but can you name one politician in history who was never wrong? Now things are going back to normal, goes the refrain. The words ‘until next time’ are never uttered, nor even thought.

And what about those thousands of dead Ukrainians, millions driven out of their homes and even their country, smouldering remnants of cities, children orphaned or killed, women raped? Oh well, war is a nasty business, we all know that. Let bygones be bygones, what?

All this goes to show that, even if some irate Russian general fires a warning shot through Putin’s head, Putinism won’t die. The West will do all it can to commit gradual suicide, by creating an environment in which Putinism can thrive.

Ladies and gentlemen, we don’t deserve to survive.   

On 22 July, 1944, Claus von Stauffenberg attempted to kill Hitler, unsuccessfully. In the aftermath, almost 5,000 conspirators were executed.

Many of them were high-ranking generals, including Erwin Rommel, one of Germany’s most talented field commanders. All those officers wanted to wrestle political control from Hitler and seek favourable surrender terms, thereby saving whatever was left of Germany.

Reading today’s news from Russia, I’m here to report that exactly the same thing has… not happened there. But the operative word here isn’t ‘not’. It’s ‘exactly’.

For something has happened that suggests that the generals are telling Putin in no uncertain terms that they’ve had enough. More important, he is forced to listen.

Four days ago, deputy head of the General Staff, Gen. Rutskoy, hinted that the war objectives were changing. Russia was abandoning the idea of total victory and was ready to limit her appetite. Instead of capturing Kiev and putting paid to the Ukraine’s sovereignty, the Russians were prepared to consolidate, and slightly expand, their hold on Donbass.

That wasn’t just a lowly Major-General running off at the mouth, as it turns out. Earlier today Defence Minister Shoigu, flanked by the Who’s Who of the Russian high command, held a teleconference in which he admitted defeat by claiming victory.

“Overall, the main goals of the first stage have been accomplished,” Shoigu said, trying to sound triumphant, but failing. “The combat potential of the Ukrainian armed forces has significantly decreased which allows us to focus the main attention and main efforts on achieving the main goal – the liberation of Donbass.”

Excuse me? Since when is that “main goal” so puny? When Putin launched the ‘special operation’, he stated much loftier objectives: the “demilitarisation and denazification” of the Ukraine. That is, liberating not just Donbass but the whole country from her Nazi regime (led by two Jews, Zelensky and his defence minister Reznikov).

In other words, wiping an independent Ukraine off the map and reincorporating her into whatever the Russian Empire calls itself these days. And now the generals are openly admitting the war objective hasn’t been achieved. That’s how military defeat has been defined since Thucydides at least.

It’s also a message to Putin: you can scream about ridding the world of the Judaeo-Banderite Ukrainian Nazis to your heart’s content, but the army has had enough. 

Some 15,000 Russian men have been killed, at least seven of them generals (for comparison’s sake, America has lost two generals in all her post-1953 wars). Most of their bodies were left where they fell, to rot in the field and to be devoured by wild beasts and stray dogs.

That treatment of fallen soldiers is nothing new for Russia, of course. Thousands if not millions of soldiers killed in the Second World War were never buried properly. And the burial sites of even 43 (!) generals remain unknown to this day.

But Putin isn’t Stalin, much as I hate to break the news to him. And his generals, while not quite matching their Nazi colleagues in professionalism, are perhaps taking their cue from the Germans’ treatment of impending defeat.

None of them has so far done a Stauffenberg, but the very fact it’s the generals, rather than their Commander-In-Chief, who have made the announcement speaks whole libraries, not just volumes. No matter how they spin the war, Russia has lost.

Khrushchev also tried to spin the Cuban crisis, presenting it as a victory. Yet no one believed him, and his Kremlin days were numbered.

Then the Soviets tried to spin their 1989 retreat from Afghanistan as a resounding success, and the USSR collapsed in 1991, partly as a result of what everyone knew was a humiliating defeat (another comparison: in the past month the Russians have lost roughly as many men as during the 10-year war in Afghanistan).

I don’t want to jump the gun, as it were. It’s possible that the teleconference and the Russian troop movements in the Ukraine are merely a ruse de guerre. The Russians may be trying to create a long operational pause, regroup and then go on the offensive again, perhaps this time with doomsday weapons.

One can’t put anything past them, and yet it does look as though Putin no longer has the support of the army, and quite possibly of the other siloviki (FSB, internal troops, National Guard, armed police units etc.). If so, and you know how much it pains me to say so, it’s not just his political life that’s hanging by a thread.

Generally speaking, I try not to indulge in conjecture and guesswork. Cassandra’s fate isn’t something that appeals to me. But one has to analyse what one sees, especially if such analysis isn’t peddled as God’s own truth.

Let’s wait for Putin’s announcement. Will there be one? Ever? I don’t know. But then it’s not just faith and charity that are cardinal virtues, but also hope.

P.S. Shoigu also mentioned in passing that no general mobilisation is on the cards. No doubt millions of Russian mothers heaved a cautious sigh of relief.

So spoke Joe Biden, and, though I couldn’t understand why he was talking of himself in the third person, I rejoiced. Seldom does one see a politician capable of such scathing self-laceration.

But then I realised Joe was speaking not of himself but of Putin – and rejoiced even more. Seldom does one see a politician capable of such uncompromising language.

My elation didn’t last. For the entire US political establishment gasped collectively and began to apologise in a truly abject chorus.

Regime change? Don’t be silly. The president didn’t mean it the way it sounded. Of course, he wants Putin to remain in power, upstanding statesman that Vlad is. That was just a slip of the tongue, we all make them. Joe meant to say, “this man MUST remain in power”, but he got momentarily distracted.

Biden’s colleagues were all shaken and Blinken. But they were right to apologise. Joe indeed spoke out of turn, and he indeed didn’t mean to sound so bolshie. And anyway, his actions speak louder than his words.

Biden’s administration proudly announced that its support for the Ukraine’s heroic struggle is unconditional. Just look at the amount of military aid the US is providing: 800 million’s worth a year.  That’s 800 big ones. Dollars. Bucks. Clams. Greenbacks. That’s a lot of support, isn’t it?

Well, that depends on how one looks at it. And the best way to look at it is by following Descartes’s dictum that all knowledge springs from comparison (that may explain his weak faith in God, who is, after all, incomparable).

Thus the Duchy of Luxemburg (p. 630,000) is providing $250 million’s worth of military aid to the Ukraine. That’s less than a third of the aid generously offered by the US (p. 340,000,000), but it stacks up quite favourably in per capita terms.

And the Czech Republic’s (p. 11,000,000) contribution of $1 billion trumps America’s not only relatively but also absolutely. Suddenly, one is beginning to fear that Biden indeed meant to say he wanted Putin not only to stay in power but also to reduce the Ukraine to cinders.

The Ukrainian army is using up 500 Stingers a day, and about as many Javelins. The US has just sent over enough of the former to last merely 3.5 days of action, and barely enough of the latter for a day and a half.

One can discern some logic in Nato’s (which, not to cut too fine a point, means America’s) reluctance to enforce a no-fly zone over the Ukraine, stopping thereby terrorist attacks on civilians. Americans fear that even one little dogfight between an F-35 and a MIG might trigger a nuclear holocaust, especially if the F-35 emerged victorious, as it almost certainly would.  

Fine, one may accept that – even though there’s much evidence against such a doomsday scenario. After all, in 2015 a Turkish F-16 shot down a Russian SU-24M fighter-bomber, and the Russians swallowed that insult without trying to take out Istanbul. And in 2018, American forces in Syria wiped out at least 200 Russian mercenaries of the Wagner gang (owned by Putin’s close associate Prigozhin). Again, no ICBMs were launched at Washington, D.C.

But even accepting that a direct involvement of Nato forces in the Ukraine is fraught with danger, it’s still hard to understand why the US is refusing to provide effective anti-aircraft systems. You know, the S-300s and Patriots of this world.

Such weapons are purely defensive by definition. Unlike, say, the Javelins, they can’t be used offensively even in theory. What they could do is save thousands of civilians from wanton destruction. And that’s what Nato is refusing to do – as it refused to transfer to the Ukraine some 20 Polish MIGs that had already been promised.

It would be tempting to say that Biden and his friends considered and rejected the argument that the Ukraine is fighting for their freedom as well. But they did no such thing.

This isn’t about arguments. It’s about character and courage. Of course, those American politicians who, unlike Biden, still have all their marbles intact, could be persuaded that the Ukraine is merely the first battlefield in Putin’s war on the West.

But even if they were certain about that, they still wouldn’t change their craven behaviour. What they miss isn’t mental strength but testicular fortitude. Perhaps they should follow fashion and ‘transition’ to men.

Many commentators don’t realise that any information on the number of Russian tanks is misleading. For, unlike the Americans, the Russians don’t melt down the previous, superseded generation of their armour.

Thousands of those slightly obsolete, but still perfectly usable, machines are mothballed in storage for future emergencies. One such emergency has now arrived, and the other day a Russian regiment was supposed to take delivery of newly reactivated tanks.

Waste not, want not is a sound idea that should work in all walks of life, including the military. Alas, this sensible practice is defeated by a Russian tradition of long standing: thieving.

You see, many electronic components in modern tanks contain precious metals, gold, platinum, that sort of thing. The temptation to steal those parts is strong, and it becomes irresistible when the mark stays in a dark warehouse for years.

Who’s to know? ask Russian soldiers, taking their pliers and screwdrivers out. A tragic answer to that frivolous question was delivered yesterday. The officer ordered to put those tanks back into service, that’s who’s to know.

The officer in question, the regiment commander, arrived with his crews at the storage facility near Bryansk, only to discover that 90 per cent of the tanks, their electronics long since stripped, were now useless lumps of armoured steel.

Out of desperation, the officer shot himself, thereby partly redeeming Russia’s martial honour, badly tarnished by this war. His suicide also proved yet again that an army isn’t a law unto itself. It’s a microcosm of society, reflecting and often magnifying its features.

One feature of Russian society has since time immemorial been the urge to steal anything not bolted to the floor or nailed to the wall. One story springs to mind.

Back in the 1820s, Alexander I asked his court historian Nikolai Karamzin how provincial officials were going about their duties. “Ils volent, sire,” replied the historian laconically (“Thieving, Your Majesty,” as translated from the official language of the court).

This, by the way, is one of the differences between the Russian and Ukrainian national characters. Today’s Ukraine is almost as corrupt as Russia, but there theft is still seen as an aberration rather than the norm.

In Russia, larceny is an ontological, rather than existential, trait. It originates from the historically cavalier treatment of private property, that cornerstone of Western polity.

That explains the initial popularity of communism and anarchism there. A Russian is emotionally and, if you will, historically predisposed to agree with Proudhon’s maxim about property being theft. The idea of dispossessing the rich and giving all their money to the poor has an instant appeal to most Russians.

If you read practically any great Russian writer, you’ll find echoes of that attitude. For example, Dostoyevsky describes in his Diaries how a Russian peasant ties up his wife and beats her to a pulp with a stick until she stops moaning and moving.

Correctly identifying such behaviour as brutish, Dostoyevsky adds that this violent savage is still purer, more spiritual than “a German Vater who works hard all his life and saves up to provide for his Kinder.” This wasn’t so much an endorsement of domestic violence as a statement of contempt for hard, remunerative work (and, of course, the West).

Tolstoy felt burdened by his baronial estate all his life and tried to give it away (or gamble it on a single hand of cards) on many occasions. Only his wife’s threat of legal action prevented the writer from beggaring his family.

Russian folklore has a whole thesaurus of proverbs on the same theme: work is useless, wealth is shameful. Off the top:

“Work isn’t a wolf, it won’t run away into the forest”; “You won’t get a stone house by honest work”; “Poverty is no vice”; “He who doesn’t nick, doesn’t eat”; “Wealth is made on people’s tears and misery”; “You can’t tell a rich man from a thief”; “Wealth is dirt, brain is gold”; “Money, like stone, lies heavy on the soul”; “If your family counts, forget about money. If you count your money, forget your family.”

Without delving too much into history, such economic anomie was cultivated over centuries by the nature of the Russian state. The country never had European-style feudalism. The tsar related to the aristocrats the way the aristocrats related to their serfs.

Implicitly, every estate in the country belonged to the tsar, who could bestow it on his favourite today, then take it away tomorrow. (Thus, dacha, the Russian for country house, is a cognate of the Russian for ‘give’. Country houses were given, not earned.) Catherine II, for example, rewarded her more ardent lovers with whole provinces. At the same time, most prison sentences included total confiscation of the convict’s property.

Peasants had at best a leasehold on their parcels, with the landlord keeping the freehold in his hands. Any peasant could be instantly dispossessed by the landowner, who in turn could be just as easily dispossessed by the tsar.

Also, even now most Russian villages are made of wood, whereas as recently as in the 19^th century so were the towns. This explains the ease with which the Russians burned down Moscow (including 30,000 of their own wounded being treated in its hospitals) before surrendering it to Napoleon in 1812.

This also explains why fires were pandemic throughout Russia, often claiming up to 80 per cent of all houses in a town. Moscow papers in the 19^th century didn’t even bother to report fires burning down less than 10 per cent of all buildings.

Hence, property in Russia was difficult to acquire, but easy to lose. That left a mark on the Russian character, and it still hasn’t been expunged.

For example, most Russians who find themselves in the West don’t understand the concept of not being able to afford something. That, to a Russian, means not to have the physical wherewithal to buy.

A Russian is likely to be baffled when his English friend tells him he can’t afford a £1,000 bottle of wine. “Don’t you have £1,000 in the bank?” he’d ask with genuine surprise and a touch of derision.

It stands to reason that people so contemptuous of their own property are unlikely to respect anybody else’s. Russians know that theft is a crime but, for them, it’s a malum prohibitum, not a malum in se.

And theft of public property is almost a badge of honour. “Public means belonging to everybody, right? I’m one of the everybody, so it belongs to me too.” Such is the unspoken – and often spoken – attitude to such matters.

There we have it: a grounded tank regiment, and its commander with a bullet in his head. All as a natural continuation of a fine Russian tradition – that is universally despised in the Ukraine.

P.S. For my linguistically gifted readers, here’s an obscene but hilarious Ukrainian song on this very subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSvUdCAHia4

Multiple Warsaw sources are reporting smoke coming out of the Russian embassy, which is consistent with the burning of documents.

Exactly the same was observed in Kiev a week before the Russian invasion. Russian diplomats were busily burning their files, those they didn’t want to fall into enemy hands.

Three days ago, 45 Russian diplomats, or rather spies working under diplomatic cover, were expelled from Poland, with the Russians promising a swift tit-for-tat retaliation. Juxtaposing the two developments, one could be forgiven for entertaining macabre premonitions.

Against the backdrop of some Russian diplomats in Warsaw packing their bags and others burning their papers, the Nato summit in Brussels looked especially pathetic. Our, in a manner of speaking, leaders were all mouthing the same line, often in the same words: “We must do all we can to make sure the war doesn’t escalate, and we aren’t dragged into a direct conflict with Russia”. Implicitly, that was leaving the Ukraine to her own fate.

Col. Putin must have been grinning like the Cheshire Cat. I suspect he felt like Hitler did after the Munich Agreement was signed. Speaking of Chamberlain and Daladier to his coterie, Hitler sneered: “What nonentities!”

Our, in a manner of speaking, leaders are all in the throes of wishful thinking, schizophrenically divorced from both observable reality and any sensible ratiocination. They think that wishing will make it so, whereas in fact their cynical cowardice is an ironclad guarantee of exactly the outcome they dread.

It takes myopia bordering on total blindness not to see that Putin’s whole reign is a gradually escalating war on the West. That war is conducted in increments more or less evenly spaced.

In 2000-2001, Putin’s air force levelled Grozny, the capital of the breakaway republic of Chechnya. No breakaways will be allowed, was the message.

In 2008, Russia attacked Georgia and helped herself to some of its territory. Same message, different geography.

In 2014, in a direct prelude to the current war, Russia annexed the Crimea and a large part of Eastern Ukraine. Everybody who had eyes to see, and especially ears to hear, knew the aggression was exactly that, a prelude.

Putin consistently refused to recognise the Ukraine’s sovereignty, treating the country as part of Russia’s patrimonial estate. It’s just that he wanted to repossess the Ukraine piecemeal, rather than all in one go.

Yet the propaganda rhetoric accompanying those heinous acts was only partly aimed at Chechnya, Georgia and the Ukraine. Another motif began to sound in a crescendo soon reaching dominance: all those enemies of Russia weren’t free agents.

They were puppets whose wires were pulled by the US, Nato and the West in general. Hence Russia wasn’t just reclaiming her birthright possessions. She was using their territory as the initial battlefields in the war on Russia’s historical enemy: the West.

That’s what our, in a manner of speaking, leaders refuse to see: you can’t prevent what has already happened and neither can you avoid what is bound to happen. The war is going on and it will definitely escalate, that’s not even up for discussion.

The only questions are where, how and on what scale. Every hope of eventual de-escalation is going up in smoke at the Russian embassy in Warsaw.

Much is being made of Russia’s reorienting her war effort towards consolidating her control of the areas she occupied in 2014. Our papers are blowing triumphant bugles: Russia is retreating, the Ukrainians are vanquishing.

This reminds me of Herodotus, writing about the ancestors of today’s Russians some 2,500 years ago. When confronted with resolute defence, marauding Scythians would retreat at a gallop, encouraging pursuit. Their enemies would fall into the trap and gallop after them, extending their lines more and more. At the right moment, the Scythians would suddenly turn around and rout their pursuers.

It’s possible that the Russians are trying to lull the Ukraine (and the West) into a false sense of security before regrouping and relaunching their offensive. It’s also possible, in fact likely, that Putin has milked this stage in the war for all it’s worth.

He knows that the West can be manipulated by nuclear blackmail. He has learned that, come what may, the West will be feverishly looking for any reason, conceivable or otherwise, not to stop Russia by force. QED.

Putin has also been reassured that Nato won’t respond in kind to his use of WMDs, especially tactical nuclear strikes. This reassurance, along with the clearly demonstrated inadequacy of Russia’s conventional forces, points to the next stage of escalation: a one-time use of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

Poland has been mentioned in that context for several weeks now, since most Western supplies reach the Ukraine through her territory. Polish eastern airfields especially are believed to be a likely target for a tactical nuclear strike, to be followed by an ultimatum similar to the one preceding the attack on the Ukraine.

That ultimatum was dismissed by the West out of hand as an empty threat. Our, in a manner of speaking, leaders ought to have followed Putin’s pronouncements more closely. Roughly at the time of that ultimatum, Putin explained his philosophy in simple words even Biden should have understood: “You should never threaten anyone. If you brandish a pistol, shoot.”

The West has never understood Putin or Russia in general, displaying most lamentable failure of either morality or intellect or, typically, both. That’s why, trying to avoid a nuclear exchange, Nato is hastening its arrival.

The question isn’t, or rather shouldn’t be, whether or not Putin will use tactical nuclear strikes (to begin with). It should be whether the ostrich strategy so blatantly displayed at the Nato summit is more or less likely to prevent that crime.

My contention, based on my understanding of Russia in general and Putin’s plans in particular, is that Nato’s refusal to engage Putin and even to supply the Ukraine with adequate defensive weapons makes further escalation, possibly with nuclear weapons, a dead certainty.

President Zelensky knows this better than I do, which is why he sounded positively Churchillian in his post-summit speech: don’t give us fulsome reassurances of sympathy, he was saying. Give us the tools to do the job – on your behalf, ladies and gentlemen.

If you give us just one per cent of your tanks, aircraft and AA systems, Zelensky was saying, not only the Ukraine but all of Europe and the world will be a hundred per cent safer.

And please, “never tell us again that our army does not meet Nato standards… We have shown how much we can do to protect against aggression everything we value, everything you value. But Nato has yet to show what the Alliance can do to save people.”

I disagree with Zelensky there. So far Nato has shown exactly what it can do: express deep concern and sympathy, supply some weapons except those that can stop mass murder, and hope, fingers crossed, that the aggression steadily escalating for 20 years will somehow peter out of its own accord.

The smoke people smell in the Warsaw air is the stench of blood, cordite and noxious fumes. It’s the stench of war into which we are sleepwalking thanks to the soporific guidance of our, in a manner of speaking, leaders.

P.S. The exact tempo of escalation is hard to predict. However, considering Putin’s age and reportedly failing health, he certainly won’t wait many years before taking the next step.

There’s much discussion going on about Russian musicians being cancelled unless they agree to denounce Putin publicly.

This reminds me of a crude but, to me, funny joke I once heard in America: A woman is buying a chicken. She picks up the bird, smells under the wings and between the legs, and says: “This chicken stinks.” “Madam,” replies the butcher, “are you sure you could pass the same test?”

I wonder if those who refuse to book Russian musicians have heard that joke. Even if they haven’t, I’m sure they must know the biblical injunction about the mote and the beam, which makes the same point more elegantly and, if you will, devotionally.

First, I’m in favour of isolating Putin’s Russia totally. If that means banning all Russian musicians, then so be it. Not many of them are worth hearing anyway, and those few who are haven’t lived in Russia for years.

The ballet of both the Bolshoi and the Mariinsky theatres, on the other hand, is definitely worth seeing. But I can only pray that missing it would be the greatest sacrifice we’ll have to make courtesy of Putin’s fascism.

The whole brouhaha came about so quickly and comprehensibly because the public has been paper-trained to accept cancel culture, with people’s careers ruined for uttering a single word contradicting woke virtues. If cancelling people for bad reasons is par for the course, then doing so for good reasons feels like a hole in one.

However, we aren’t banning Russian musicians unconditionally. They can still come if they mouth any version of the slogan currently popular in both the Ukraine and Russia: Putin is a dickhead (polite translation of the Russian Путин хуйло). That way they could save their Western careers at the cost of losing their domestic ones.

This strikes me as hypocritical. If denouncing Putin publicly is a pre-condition for appearing on concert platforms in the West, why single out just Russian musicians? Why not demand a similar declaration from Western ones too? And why, for that matter, are Chinese musicians not required to repudiate Xi on pain of losing their Western engagements? Actually, banning them all would represent even a smaller loss to music.

Generally speaking, if we cancelled every writer and musician with whose politics we disagree, we (well, I) wouldn’t even be allowed to read War and Peace (soon to be retitled Special Operation and Peace, one hears).

Yet speaking not generally but specifically, boycotting all Russian musicians – and not just Putin’s propagandists like Gergiev and Netrebko – only makes sense if we admit that the West is de facto at war with Russia, even in the absence of such casuistic formalities as an official declaration.

If we stop cowering behind such casuistry to pretend the West isn’t at war with Putin, even though he is manifestly at war with the West, then yes, Russian musicians become enemy aliens who can’t be allowed in.

Even in that case, however, cancelling performances of Tchaikovsky’s, Scriabin’s or Prokofiev’s works will continue to be an exercise in monumental and hysterical cretinism. Whatever next? A pyre of Tolstoy’s, Dostoyevsky’s and Gogol’s books?

Now, this is where that woman with her chicken comes in, or, if you’d rather, the story of the mote and the beam.

If we are de facto at war with Russia, how is it that Western media continue to be open to pro-Putin pieces? Surely they must be treated as enemy propaganda, whose disseminators should be put into internment camps at least for the duration of the war? (Messrs Hitchens, Liddle, Buchanan and Carlson spring to mind.)

We do have freedom of speech, but it’s never absolute even in peacetime, never mind during a war. If you disagree, try to publish in any mainstream newspaper an article about homosexuality being a deadly sin, or different races having different median IQs, and see how far you’ll get.

If Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail wasn’t allowed to publish during the war the same pro-Nazi articles it had published before the war, then how come the same paper is allowed to publish Hitchens’s thinly veiled pro-Putin propaganda now?

And if we see nothing wrong with that, then why punish Russian musicians simply because they refuse to act as dummies to our self-righteous ventriloquists? That strikes me as illogical and therefore hypocritical.

I don’t think an apolitical pianist who’d rather not kill his Russian career by taking an anti-Putin cue would do us much harm. Certainly nothing even remotely comparable to that done by the musings of a Putin fan writing deranged nonsense, along the lines of Moscow streets and churches being so lovely that we should stop arming the Ukrainians.

“Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.” And, if I may add my own comment, if thou won’t, the best thing thou can do is shut up.