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These words are burning their way across my lips. But they need to come out because few people realise how true they are.

Our papers are filled with triumphant noises about Putin’s miscalculations. Whatever the sheet, it contains all the same hymns.

Putin underestimated the strength of the Ukrainian army. He overestimated the strength of his own. He didn’t count on the ferocity of the Ukraine’s resistance. Nor did he expect such an instant and massive arrival of Western sanctions and boycotts. He looked forward to a cakewalk, but instead walked into a carnage.

All of this is true. Yet none of it contradicts the title above.

For Putin didn’t start the war because he thought the Ukraine would roll over and die within days. He started it on the assumption that the West is weak, decadent and therefore a soft touch. And this assumption has been vindicated so comprehensively that one has to commend Putin’s perspicacity.

The miscalculations that so excite our commentators would matter only if Putin’s fascist regime pursued strictly limited objectives, such as reincorporating the Ukraine into whatever the Russian Empire calls itself nowadays. It doesn’t though. Nor am I really sure they were miscalculations.

For Putin knows that part of the world as well as I do. His understanding of Russia (and to a limited extent of the Ukraine) is as native and visceral as mine – which is essential for anyone wishing to penetrate Russia’s enigmatic quality that so baffled Churchill. I doubt Putin is as well-read on this subject as I am, but unlike me, he is privy to a huge corpus of intelligence data, which he is professionally trained to analyse.

Hence, if I knew the Ukrainian army would fight ferociously and expertly, he knew it too. If I knew the Russian army wasn’t as formidable in battle as it was on paper, so did he. If I knew the Ukraine spent the eight post-2014 years training and arming her soldiers, Putin knew it better: he had at his fingertips detailed reports of every Stinger and Javelin delivered, every Ukrainian unit holding tactical exercises, every Ukrainian general drawing strategic plans.

Quite apart from the usual SIGINT and human intelligence resources available to any major power, Putin could rely on a swarm of his spies buzzing around the Ukraine. That’s the legacy of the Soviet Union, and every one of its former colonies is similarly infected.

(That’s the only reason I’ve ever been sceptical about admitting former Soviet and Warsaw Pact republics into Nato. Since most of their senior officers were trained and indoctrinated in the Soviet Union, at least some must have retained their erstwhile loyalty.

That creates a counterintelligence problem for Nato, as anticipated by St Matthew: “For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither any thing hid, that shall not be known and come abroad.”

As if to vindicate that biblical prophecy, the Hungarian Sándor Laborc was appointed chairman of Nato’s Intelligence Committee in 2008 – the year Russia attacked Georgia. The two developments might not have been coincidental, considering that Gen. Laborc was an honours graduate of the Dzerjinsky KGB Academy in Moscow, where he had studied for six years.)

One way or another, Putin had to know what to expect, at least in broad outlines. And yet he pressed ahead, potential risks notwithstanding. Why?

Is he bent on self-destruction? Or mad, as so many of our hacks like to aver? Didn’t he know he could be overthrown/imprisoned/assassinated if things went awry?

Any of such outcomes may yet befall Putin. After all, every Caesar breeds his own Brutus. Every tyrant has a praetorian who daydreams of assuming dictatorial powers himself.

So it’s conceivable that an army or FSB general may slip a little novichok into Putin’s tea and then move into the Kremlin, using Russia’s tactical setbacks as a justification. Yet if it’s indeed an army or FSB general who’ll administer such a coup de grâce (who else?), then Putin may die, but Putinism will live on.

For Putin’s strategic assumptions, and therefore objectives, have been vindicated. He has proved that the West will huff and puff, and it’ll punish Russia economically but, come what may, it won’t confront Russian aggression militarily. A little nuclear blackmail, and Adolph is your uncle.

Moreover, Nato will even try not to upset Russia too much by arming her victims too well. To wit: not only has Nato refused to enforce a no-fly zone over Ukrainian cities, but it has even blocked the transfer of Polish MIGs to the Ukraine, denying Ukrainian pilots a chance to stop by their own efforts the ongoing massacre of civilians.

If we understand that the Ukraine isn’t the destination, but merely a step along the way, then Putin (or whoever gets rid of him) can afford to take half a step back. He may wring some minor concessions out of Zelensky, declare victory, go home and regroup.

He wouldn’t even be desperately unhappy. Yes, he didn’t achieve all his tactical objectives in the Ukraine. But strategically, he’d feel satisfied. The West is so impotent that Putin’s next step could be a giant stride towards dominating Europe, whatever articles the Nato Charter may have.

If the West won’t fight over the Ukraine, it won’t fight over the Baltics either. Or perhaps even Finland and Poland. After all, they all used to belong to the Russian Empire, and the West was satisfied with that claim when Putin grabbed the Crimea. Prior possession seems to be 100 per cent of the law in those parts.

And the Ukraine isn’t going anywhere. Even if a ceasefire is called, and the Ukrainian state remains sovereign for the next year or two, the Ukrainians won’t have time to prepare for Round 2 adequately. Any ideas to the contrary, and perhaps a limited nuclear strike will disabuse them.

Here you may think I’m letting my imagination run too wild. Putin’s nuclear bluster is good and well, but no nuclear strike will ever go unanswered, no doubt there.

This brings me to Yulia Latynina, the anti-Putin Russian journalist who in 2017 had to emigrate after credible threats on her life. She now runs her own streaming service, where some 10 days ago she interviewed Michael McFaul, former US ambassador to Russia, head of a think tank and a close, if unofficial, advisor to President Biden.

Latynina is well aware of Putin’s plans for an incremental advance, dipping his toe in the water and, if no sharks are about, taking the next cautious step. The question that bothered her, as it does me, was where the US would draw the red line. Surely, she asked, if Putin launches a tactical nuclear strike, Nato will have to respond in kind?

Not at all, replied Dr McFaul in his ungrammatical but understandable Russian. Just because Putin is crazy, that doesn’t mean we should be too. Latynina, who until that moment had been suitably differential, visibly winced.

Unfortunately, that interview went unnoticed in the West – partly because of the language in which it was conducted and partly because Western countries would rather not scare their own people too much.

If Putin borrows his strategy from Hitler, our peerless leaders borrow theirs from the ostrich. Or else from a child, who thinks that, if he shuts his eyes, a scary apparition will go away.

If history teaches anything (which it usually doesn’t), the lesson is that a fascist regime bent on conquest can’t be mollified, appeased or bribed. Sooner or later, civilised countries will have to fight, and sooner is better than later for reducing the damage.

Here too Putin is right. Not long ago, he shared with his adoring audience his youthful experience as a self-described ‘common thug’. “When a fight is unavoidable,” he smiled nostalgically, “you should always strike first”.

That I’m sure the West will never do. In fact, I’m beginning to doubt its ability to strike even second.

Do you think my arithmetic is faulty?

Fine, I admit adding up isn’t my core strength. However, I do know that 41 is greater than 3.5. But does Harry Howard, history correspondent for The Mail?

Apparently not. This he proved when drawing this parallel between the current rape of the Ukraine and the Soviet attack on Finland in November, 1939: “…more than 80 years ago, the similarly small Finland took on the might of the Soviet Union…”

If you look at the title above, the first numeral is the 2022 population of the Ukraine and the second is the corresponding statistic for Finland, 1939. I wouldn’t call that ‘similarly small’, would you?

Oh well, that’s just a careless oversight, we all commit them. The problem is that Mr Howard then proves the points I’m making increasingly often. One of them is general: the professional level of our journalism is slipping.

The other is specific: hacks writing about Russia, past or present, don’t study that subject deeply enough. Howard’s article is a case in point.

He first shows his ignorance by repeating Soviet propaganda on the casus belli: “At the time, Stalin feared an attack by Nazi Germany… and claimed the need to protect the capital Leningrad… from attack.”

Any serious student of the Second World War will know that Stalin didn’t fear a Nazi attack – not in November, 1939, nor at any time until it actually occurred on 22 June, 1941.

Putin’s role model compared the relative strength of the Red Army and the Wehrmacht, and, unlike me, Stalin was good at arithmetic. He knew the Red Army enjoyed an overwhelming numerical superiority in personnel and every type of armaments.

Soviet tanks not only were the next generation compared to German panzers, but also outnumbered them at least 7:1. The Red Air Force’s planes were comparable to the Luftwaffe’s, while outnumbering them in every category (except dive bombers). The Soviet artillery park was several times greater and, unlike the Wehrmacht that was mostly equipped with WWI guns, it was state-of-the-art.

That’s why Stalin was so shocked when the Nazis did attack two years later: he had done his sums, concluding that, if anyone was to launch a first strike, it should have been him. So it wasn’t his fear of Germany’s attack on Leningrad that made him pounce on Finland.

What was it? According to Howard, “the Winter War began… when Finland refused to agree to Stalin’s demand to give up territory so he could push Russia’s border westwards.”

Now, unlike me, Marshal Mannerheim, the Finnish leader, was good at maths. And unlike Stalin, he was a professional soldier who, under Nicholas II, had risen to the rank of Lieutenant-General in the Russian General Staff (Finland was part of the Russian Empire at the time).

Hence Mannerheim had no trouble comparing a series of numerals, starting with those in the title above. He also knew that Finland had precious few tanks and practically no air force.

So why did he prove so intransigent? Surely he knew Finland couldn’t hold on to every inch of her territory in case of a Soviet attack? Why didn’t he avoid bloodshed and let Stalin have a part of Karelia, hoping he’d choke on it?

Simple. Unlike Mr Howard, Mannerheim knew Stalin wasn’t just after a piece of Finland. He was after the whole thing.

Some of it was pure acquisitiveness: following the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Stalin was in a hurry to claim the lands stipulated in that document. But also coming into play was Stalin’s particular hatred for Poland and Finland, the two parts of the Russian Empire that had repelled the Bolsheviks by force.

The Poles routed the Red Army in the 1920 Battle of Warsaw. The Finns had their own Civil War at the time the Russians had theirs. But the outcomes were different.

‘White’ Finns, brilliantly led by Mannerheim, defeated the ‘Reds’, and their chieftain, Otto Kuusinen, ran away to Moscow, where he stayed until his death in 1964. Hence, in addition to his imperial greed for territory, Stalin hated the Finns in general and Mannerheim in particular.

Just like Putin today, Stalin wanted to restore Russia within the borders of the Russian Empire. Having had to contend himself with merely half of Poland, he now wanted all of Finland.

To that end he formed a quisling communist government of Finland, led by that same Otto Kuusinen, an old Comintern subversive. Staffing the government proved hard because by that time Stalin had purged Comintern, executing most communist leaders taking refuge in Moscow. However, he did keep Kuusinen and a few others on tap. Just in case.

Mannerheim knew that, and he was also familiar with the song offensive being prepared by Stalin. Anticipating his conquest of Europe, Stalin had commissioned more than 70 rousing songs to be sung by the Red Army as it marched into one country after another.

Some of them were used, some weren’t because the requisite conditions failed to materialise. One that was used featured the refrain “Admit us Suomi, you beauty, into the necklace of your limpid lakes”.

Apart from waxing poetic about Finland’s limpid lakes, the song also explained that “Your motherland has been taken away from you more than once; we’ve come to give it back to you; we’ve come to assist your reprisals, your repayment with interest for your humiliation…”

Howard writes that Finland suffered defeat, in spite of inflicting heavy casualties on the Russians.

True, as a result of the war Russia did claim about 10 per cent of Finland’s territory. But do let’s agree on the terms. In military terms, victory means fulfilling the original objectives, not 10 per cent of them.

Since Stalin’s objective wasn’t pushing the Soviet border away from Leningrad (as he and now Howard claimed), but incorporating Finland into the Soviet Union, the Red Army suffered a crushing defeat. Stalin was incensed, and he continued the fine Russian tradition going back to Ivan the Terrible by executing all of his own returning POWs.

Still, why did he agree to a ceasefire? The Finns had been fighting heroically and brilliantly, but towards the end of winter, 1940, they had run out of steam. The people were exhausted, the army was bleeding to death and running out of essential supplies.

Why then, having suffered horrendous losses, did Stalin agree to take merely a patch of Finland’s territory? It wasn’t just the casualties – the Russians tend not to care about such details.

But the Red Army had been made to look ridiculous in the eyes of the world. And the Soviet Union had been expelled from the League of Nations, meaning Stalin had failed to fool anyone into thinking he was anything but a diabolical aggressor.

At that time, the Red Army could redeem itself by indeed occupying all of Finland. Why didn’t it?

Here Howard misleads his readers again: “Exhausted Finland had been forced to fight without the assistance of Britain and France – who were already at war with Germany.”

In spite of being at war with Germany, Britain still managed to send some volunteers, mostly pilots, to fight with the Finns. But that was just a token gesture.

However, another gesture came with the force of a sabre cut. HMG communicated to the Kremlin that, unless the Russians stopped their advance, the RAF would take out the Baku oilfields by an air raid from its Iraqi base at Mosul.

Apparently, by way of illustration, the British sent Stalin a documentary film about the everyday life of British aircrews in Iraq. Suddenly the documentary footage was interrupted by an animated sequence showing a dotted line on the map, starting at Mosul and going dot-dot-dot all the way to Baku. Stalin got the message and called a halt.

None of this means that parallels can’t be drawn between the on-going monstrosity and the Winter War. Yet if such parallel lines start at ignorance, they end up at misinformation. Which seems to be the stock in trade of our press nowadays.

When in my misspent Moscow youth I freelanced as interpreter-guide, mainly to American student groups, I was instructed how to parry critical comments about the Soviet Union.

The instruction period was short: the title above emerged as the main mandated reply to any criticism.

“Your shop shelves are empty.” “And you lynch blacks.”

“You have no real elections.” “And you lynch blacks.”

“No foreign newspapers are sold.” “And you lynch blacks.”

“You keep millions in concentration camps.” “And you lynch blacks.”

“You sent tanks into Hungary and Czechoslovakia.” “And you lynch blacks.”

“Russia is much poorer than any Western country.” “And you lynch blacks.”

And so on, ad infinitum. Not wishing to come across as more stupid than God originally made me, I couldn’t bring myself to mouth such obvious inanities. And anyway, I already knew the expression “two wrongs don’t make a right”.

Even assuming that every tree in America was indeed decorated with dangling blacks, that didn’t make Lenin’s and Stalin’s crimes any less objectionable. Hence the requisite reply was a non sequitur, a rhetorical fallacy.

A few years later my toxic presence could no longer be tolerated in the Soviet Union, and the investigating KGB officer magnanimously gave me the choice of going either West or East, meaning a Siberian prison camp. A tough one, that.

When I found myself in the US, I didn’t see any dangling blacks. However, I did see, read and hear countless journalists, academics and casual acquaintances who responded to criticism of the Soviet Union with more sophisticated versions of the same argument I had been loath to use as a 20-year-old.

By then I had already started reading National Review and so knew that such shoddy reasoning was called ‘moral equivalence’. This is how it worked:

“The Soviets have concentration camps.” “We kept Nisei Americans in internment camps. What’s the difference?”

“They have the KGB.” “We have the CIA.”

“The KGB spies on its own citizens.” “So does our FBI.”

“The Soviets killed millions.” “We killed four at Kent State.” “Four million?” “No, just four. But numbers don’t affect morality.”

“The Soviet population is thoroughly pauperised.” “We have poor people too.”

“Soviet medicine is antediluvian.” “But it’s free.”

“They are taught nothing but lies about the West.” “We tell lies about the Soviet Union.”

The preponderance of ‘moral equivalence’ was so universal and uniform that I wondered if the wielders of that argument were beneficiaries of the same instruction I had received way back then, and from the same source.

Most, I’m sure, weren’t. But some, I’m equally sure, were. Otherwise it’s hard to explain why they were all singing the same tune from the same hymn sheet, in unison.

This brings me to Peter Hitchens, who unfailingly provides topics for me on “any given Sunday”, to borrow the title of the American film. Yesterday he was appalled by what he tends to call our hysteria about Putin’s beastliness, which is hypocritical and Russophobic. After all, we continue to trade with the ghastly Saudi Arabia.

And didn’t we invade Iraq in 2003 exactly the same way Putin invaded the Ukraine in 2022? Thus we have no moral right to protest against indiscriminate bombings of civilians, something of which, Hitchens hastens to disclaim, he wholeheartedly disapproves.

This coincides, almost verbatim, with the line peddled in Putin’s speeches (including the two most recent ones) and those of his mouthpieces. Except that they tend to go further back, all the way to the Second World War, the mainstay of Putin’s militarist ideology.

Suddenly echoes of my unlamented youth begin to reverberate through both RT and, courtesy of Hitchens, The Mail on Sunday:

We bombed Dresden, they bomb Mariupol, what’s the moral difference?

We invaded Iraq, they invaded the Ukraine. Same thing.

We trade with Saudi Arabia and China, so how come we refuse to trade with Russia?

One such exchange is doubtless being kept for future use: We nuclear-bombed Hiroshima, they nuclear-bombed [whatever the target will be]. Where’s the moral distinction? 

Variations differ, but the theme never changes, and neither does the implicit upshot. Let’s abandon the Ukraine to her fate, stop this hysteria and go back to treating Putin as if nothing happened.

That’s where the non sequiturs come in. We can discuss the West’s immorality to our hearts’ content, inevitably agreeing in the end that Western countries have been known to sin both individually and collectively.

Yet there are degrees and nuances. A boy telling his mother to shut up is a sinner, and so is a boy who cuts his mother’s throat. I don’t know whether God will judge both equally, but anyone insisting on such parity in this world is either dishonest or certifiably mad.

Now, I detested the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and I agree it was immoral. Even worse, it was geopolitically illiterate.

And yes, the rulers of Saudi Arabia and China both run abhorrent regimes, with the latter capable of presenting an existential threat to us in the future.

And yes, I’d be happier if we didn’t allow evil regimes to hold our economies to ransom, something that both Saudi Arabia and, many times over, China are doing.

By all means, we should discuss this in a different context. But in this context, tying that to Putin’s mass murder is simply regurgitating enemy propaganda.

Neither Saudi Arabia nor China is waging vicious war in the middle of Europe, and they aren’t threatening us with nuclear annihilation. Neither Saudi Arabia nor China is trying to blow collective security sky high, not yet at any rate. Russia is, and Putin’s fascist regime is a factor of what Oliver Wendell Holmes called “a clear and present danger”.

Hence Putin’s and Hitchens’s pathetic attempts to invoke equally black pots and kettles must be dismissed with contempt. China definitely and Saudi Arabia probably are the bridges we’ll have to cross sooner or later. But the bridge separating us from a nuclear exchange with Putin’s Russia has already been mined, and his finger is already on the button.

One has to admire the steadfast consistency with which Hitchens peddles Putin’s lies and lines. Vlad rages about Ukrainian Nazis; Peter refers to the Ukraine gaining independence as a “putsch”. Vlad explains the war is necessary to stop Nato’s eastward expansion; Peter repeats the lie with canine fidelity. Vlad talks moral equivalence; so does Peter.

One could be forgiven for thinking there exists an osmotic link between the two. At least I hope the link is merely osmotic.

The son et lumière was missing, and the whole tenor was less operatic than operettic. But it’s the spirit that counts, and Vlad’s second coming before the adulating public did manage to convey the essence of a Nuremberg rally.

Putin bravely emerged from his faraway crypt into the lay world, driving tens of thousands into mandatory frenzy at Moscow’s Luzhniki stadium. Walking to the microphone, Vlad was noticeably unsteady on his feet, which didn’t at all lower the volume of the uproar.

However, once the initial clamour died out, many enthusiasts began to sneak out. Most of those shirkers were government workers shepherded in willy-nilly, or else students told they could play truant this once. Having ticked the required box, they sneaked out to go about their daily business.

Yet even such national traitors couldn’t subtract anything from either the pomp or the circumstance. Even old Leni would have liked the stage set, though she’d have had a thing or two to say about the lighting (“Vhere are ze torches, mein Russische Führer?”).

There were flags aplenty, and flying banners proudly displayed the letter ‘Z’, the symbol of the ‘special operation’. That made me wonder what happened to the other half of the swastika. The stadium was also decorated with a giant slogan “We don’t give up our own”. That made we wonder who “our own” were.

According to reports I’m unable to verify, Vlad belied his modest salary by wearing a £10,000 jacket and a £2,400 jumper. But the speech he made was priceless, replete as it was with evangelical overtones.

They say generals always fight the last war. Vlad went them one better by backtracking to even earlier battles. He kept putting the word ‘Nazi’ and its derivatives into every other sentence, no doubt expecting to evoke the Red Army’s stand at the gates of Moscow in December, 1941.

For a second there I thought he was applying that designation to Russia herself, where fascistic parties regularly claim at least 20 per cent of the vote. Contextually, however, it became clear Vlad was referring to the Ukraine, where the corresponding number is a mere three per cent. But the event wasn’t about hair-splitting pedantry, was it?

The rally was ostensibly staged to commemorate the eighth anniversary of the Russian democrats’ previous attack on the Ukrainian Nazis. That daring action, according to Vlad, stopped the genocide perpetrated by the latter.

It’s good to see that the Russians are acting in the spirit of their proverb, “It takes a wedge to knock out another wedge.” Only real genocide can stop imaginary genocide, and Vlad is a keen connoisseur of folklore.

A pedant would again argue that, since the Russians aren’t killing Ukrainians simply for their ethnicity, what they are committing should be more appropriately called ‘democide’, not ‘genocide’. I’m glad we’ve sorted this lexical confusion out, but one way or the other Putin’s ‘lads’, as he calls them, are murdering Ukrainians indiscriminately.

The ‘lads’ are being mown down in their thousands, but, according to Vlad, they are happy to die for “the universal values of Russia”. These have been passed down through generations from St John, whom Vlad thereby co-opted to the noble cause of bombing theatres and maternity hospitals.

To support his statement about every conscript going to his death with a smile on his face, Vlad actually quoted the fourth evangelist: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

There Vlad made a dramatic 20-second pause, no doubt expecting a standing ovation. When none came, he repeated the quotation verbatim, and at that point the crowd got its cue and applauded, albeit rather perfunctorily.

Thus encouraged, Putin pressed on: “The best confirmation of this is how our lads are fighting during this operation, shoulder to shoulder, helping each other… We haven’t had such unity in a long time.” Can’t imagine why not. 

To add an historical perspective to the religious one, Vlad then invoked the spirit of the 18^th century admiral Fyodor Ushakov, who in 2001 was canonised by the KGB Church… sorry, I meant the Russian Orthodox Church, for having killed an awful lot of Turks.

At that point, many in the crowd began to whistle, the Russian equivalent of booing. The broadcast was instantly interrupted, and some revolting pop music began to be played (disclaimer: all pop music sounds revolting to me).

Leni Riefenstahl must have been looking on with mixed feelings from that great studio in the sky. On the one hand, the production values were a bit hit and miss and, let’s face it, pop can’t compete with Wagner for dramatic effect.

But then it was good to see that Nazism was still alive in Moscow, even if she found it somewhat wanting in style. Next time get your big torch out for the lads, Vlad, she said – and went back whence she had come.

P.S. Malicious rumours to the contrary, the title of Tolstoy’s celebrated novel hasn’t been changed to Special Operation and Peace.

Everywhere one looks one finds supposedly sensible ideas on how to end the war in the Ukraine. Yet they are sensible only supposedly, not really.

They all proceed from the premise that the savage rape of the Ukraine has to stop. All God’s children are in agreement there, as they no doubt were on the desirability of stopping the bombing of London in 1940.

Yet in those unsophisticated times people were still able to ask the question: “How?” That pragmatic English question implied that not every outcome was equally acceptable. After all, the easiest way of stopping a war is to surrender.

That can take different shapes, as it could in 1940. Britain’s surrender didn’t have to be called just that, and it wouldn’t necessarily have led to German occupation. Hitler would have been happy with Britain declaring neutrality and agreeing to limit the size of the Royal Navy. He could then pay his undivided attention to the Soviet Union, with good chances of success.

Now, it’s clear that what Lenin called the ‘maximum programme’ hasn’t worked out for Putin. It increasingly appears he’ll be able neither to occupy the Ukraine nor to produce a regime change. This failure is widely perceived as a de facto defeat, although the consensus is that the Ukraine and her friends mustn’t rub Putin’s face in it.

His bloated face, say countless commentators, should be saved. And Zelensky would be well-advised to accept the kind of terms Hitler dangled before Churchill to no avail.

The Ukraine should acknowledge the legitimacy of Russia’s annexation of the Crimea and two eastern provinces. Then she must declare her neutrality, forswearing Nato membership in perpetuity.

She should also denazify and demilitarise, meaning ban all fascistic parties (those that polled three per cent of the vote in the latest elections), reduce her armed forces and promise never to accept foreign bases on her soil. Instead, the Ukraine should rely on Nato’s, especially Britain’s, guarantee of protection.

If I were Ukrainian, at this point I’d jump up and shout that actually such a guarantee has been in place since 1994, when Russia, the US and the UK signed the Budapest Memorandum. They pledged to protect the Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for her giving up Soviet nuclear weapons.

The Ukraine kept her end of the bargain, but the other three signatories demonstrably didn’t. So, if I were Ukrainian, I could be forgiven for feeling ever so slightly sceptical about that idea. But since I’m not Ukrainian, I’ll move right along.

In return for such minor concessions, Russia would withdraw her troops to where they were before 24 February. Bloodshed would stop, both sides would declare victory, Putin’s face would be saved, Macron’s face would be shaved, and Zelensky’s face would appear in encyclopaedias next to the entry for ‘heroism’.

Above all, Ukrainian women and children would no longer be murdered, maimed or sexually abused. Happiness all around. Time to lick the wounds and begin to heal them.

Such is the theme on which Russian, Western and even some Ukrainian commentators improvise endless variations. Yet the variations are gratingly discordant because the theme is faulty.

For any outcome along these lines would constitute a resounding victory for Putin and a crushing defeat not only for the Ukraine, but also for what’s left of the free world.

All those scenarios would make sense if the on-going war were strictly a regional conflict. But because it isn’t, they don’t.

Just scan Putin’s speech of 21 February (the translation is available on the net), and you’ll see that for him the Ukraine is merely the first battle in Russia’s war on the West. As far as he is concerned, the Third World War has already started.

The real enemy is variously identified as America, Britain, Nato or the West. That’s the fortress to be taken, and the Ukraine is merely the first bulwark. And the real enemy, whatever Putin calls it, has already surrendered in advance by showing cowardice in the face of nuclear threats.

That’s why both Biden and Johnson hastened to reassure Putin even before the invasion of the Ukraine that Nato wouldn’t confront him militarily, come what may. And that’s why they’ve refused to enforce a no-fly zone over a devastated Ukraine.

Putin and every mouthpiece at his disposal are hissing the same message at the West round the clock. We know, they happily admit, that we can’t defeat you by a conventional offensive. But we have nuclear weapons and – unlike you – we won’t hesitate to use them if you confront us. Because – unlike you – we don’t mind taking a few million casualties, and you do.

However the war in the Ukraine ends, or rather interrupts, Putin has learned all he needed to know. Wave a nuclear-armed ICBM in the air, and the West will be paralysed.

Thus Biden’s recent assurance that Nato would defend “every inch” of its members’ territory is an encouragement rather than a deterrent. Putin is in no hurry to escalate the war into Poland, Hungary or even Estonia. That can wait. There’s enough of other prey to feast on.

Moldova isn’t a Nato member. Neither is Finland. Neither is Sweden. And Putin and his Goebbelses have been making threatening noises about those countries.

Desist from joining Nato, they’ve been threatening, or else. Don’t forget that Finland used to be part of the Russian Empire, and Sweden its mortal enemy.

So let’s say that tomorrow the Russians start doing to Helsinki what they are currently doing to Mariupol. Obviously the Finns will fight, as they did so brilliantly in the Winter War of 1939-1940, almost holding the Russians to a draw.

But in those days the Soviets didn’t have the same air power they have today. In 1939 they managed to wreak much destruction of Finnish cities, but they didn’t level them. Today they could.

What would be the West’s reaction? New sanctions? Probably. Arms supplies to Finland. Definitely. A no-fly zone? Don’t be silly.

The Russians would just say exactly what they are saying now. That would be an act of war, and we have nuclear… and so on, you know the mantra. Sweden would be next, and I can’t think of any plausible reason to believe that the West would suddenly grow some courage.

Nor should the Baltics rest easy. They may be Nato members, but would Nato risk a strategic nuclear exchange to defend them, Article 5 or no Article 5?

At the time of the Munich conference, Paris Left Bank bobos were sneering: “Mourir pour Danzig?”. Do you think they’d be more eager to die for Tallinn? Somehow I doubt that.

The Ukrainians should realise, as I’m sure they do, that any peace treaty with Russia would merely be a temporary truce. The Russians would regroup and come back in force.

As for Moldova, it’s embarrassing even to mention that tiny country in this context. The Russians could grab it practically without a shot, and no one in the West would demur. And if even a timid objection is raised, well, “we have nuclear weapons, and thank you very much for shutting up.”

This is the time when we need Trumans and Reagans, Churchills and Thatchers, leaders and statesmen. Instead we get… well, you know whom, or rather what, we get. Rather than fighting a Third World War, our spivocrats refuse even to acknowledge that it’s under way already. And we are losing.

P.S. You might say that it’s easy for me to sit at my computer in London and tell Ukrainians to fight to the bitter end. Yet I’m doing no such thing. I don’t know what kind of casualties they’ve suffered, nor how long they can continue to hold on. I’m only trying to analyse the situation as best I can.

P.P.S. Speaking on St Patrick’s Day, Joe Biden said: “I may be Irish, but I’m not stupid.” Wrong on both counts.

Three days before the invasion of the Ukraine Putin made a speech declaring war on the West. Yesterday he made another speech declaring war on his own people.

I wish I had read the first speech on 21 February, when Putin made it. Then I would have had no doubt that Putin’s bandit raid on the Ukraine was coming within days – and, moreover, that the Ukraine was only a step along the way.

Without boring you with long quotes, I’ll just give you the gist.

The West in general and the US in particular are planning to destroy Russia by a nuclear attack, thereby fulfilling their historical objective going back centuries before such weapons were even developed.

To that end they have set up military bases in the Ukraine (meaning training camps for Ukrainian soldiers) and are helping those Ukie fascists develop their own WMDs, to be used on Moscow.

This, after the West made a solemn promise never to expand Nato eastwards. “I quote,” added Putin, though the transcript of his speech doesn’t feature the requisite quotation marks. That stands to reason, for in the very next sentence Putin explained that he was referring to “verbal agreements”.

(He should have asked his loyal stooge for help. Hitchens regularly refers to “piles of documents” chiselling that promise in stone, which he could quote but for some inexplicable reason never does.)

Hence Russia has no alternative but to stamp the threat out, continued Putin. Nobody threatens the very existence of a sovereign Russian state and gets away with it.

Since the Ukraine is an American puppet, it’s the immediate threat to Russia’s survival. But the ultimate enemy isn’t the puppet but the wire-puller: the West.

All that was eerily reminiscent of similar speeches made by Hitler in the run-up to the Second World War. For the Ukraine, read Poland, which was supposedly preparing to attack Germany and destroy both her sovereignty and Kultur. For the West, read the plutocratic Anglo-Saxons and the Jewish bankers of Wall Street and the City.

But Hitler didn’t just rant about foreign enemies. He also talked about ‘national traitors’, those bacilli gnawing on Germany’s healthy body from within.

To eliminate the vestigial doubts anyone might still harbour about Putin’s role models, yesterday he repeated those diatribes almost verbatim, even using the same term, ‘national traitors’.

Just like der Führer, Vlad didn’t pull back. Describing those national traitors as “scum”, he compared them to a midge getting into one’s mouth. Russia is going to spit those national traitors out, promised Putin, at first without specifying whom exactly he meant by those metaphorical insects.

The oversight was quickly corrected. Those scum traitors are the fifth column working in cahoots with “the collective West trying to splinter our society, speculating on military losses and on socioeconomic effects of sanctions in order to provoke a popular rebellion in Russia…”

And then came the translation from the metaphorical language of “spitting out” into one every Russian can instantly understand: “I am certain that this necessary and natural self-purging of society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, togetherness, and our readiness to answer any calls to action.”

Do you detect the turnaround in the vector? The pre-invasion speech was directed outwards, transparently hinting at Russia’s intention to eradicate her external enemies — starting with those Judaeo-Banderite Ukie Nazis, then moving on to their Western masters.

Yesterday’s speech switched the accent to the enemies within, which again followed Hitler’s model. But der Führer didn’t talk in vague generalities. He didn’t withhold from his adulating audiences the identity of those internal enemies: Jews, abetted by Gypsies, retards and sexual deviants.

So inspired, Vlad decided to be specific too. First, he magnanimously excluded from the list of traitors to be purged, “those with villas in Miami or the French Riviera” or those “who cannot live without foie gras and oysters…”

In other words he isn’t going to purge Russia’s entire ruling elite (starting with himself) who all show affection for such paraphernalia of Western decadence. Yet they are only off the hook if they are “mentally with Russia” – even if they are physically in London or Nice.

“The problem does not lie in [mansions in Miami, foie gras and oysters], but I repeat, the fact that many of these people inwardly, mentally live elsewhere and not here with us, with our people, with Russia.”

No Russian will fail to get the sinister message. Targetted for purging aren’t Putin’s fellow gangsters, who alone can afford “villas in Miami or the French Riviera”, but all Russians leaning towards the West culturally and spiritually.

They all are to be cast in the role of Hitler’s Jews, traitors to Putin’s version of Russia as a Nazi state standing alone against a hostile world. Their fate is to be gruesome, make no mistake about that.

The word ‘purge’ used by Putin isn’t just significant in its denotation, but also evocative in its connotation. It evokes the cordite stench of Lubyanka cellars, torture, barbed wire fences herding together skeletal inmates of the Gulag, shrill campaigns against ‘enemies of the people’, a whole population bullied into silence and blind obedience.

Yet the version implied by Putin’s speech is more Hitlerite than Stalinist, or rather early Stalinist. In his last years, Stalin too expanded his accent from traitors to the communist ideals to those betraying Russian national values.

After the war Stalin began to see in his mind’s eye the ideal of a Nazi Russia modelled on Hitler’s Germany (complete with a comprehensive Jewish pogrom), but death stopped him in the nick of time. Putin, alas, is still alive, and so far he hasn’t zeroed in on the Jews.

Instead, at least initially, he equates national treason with any preference for civil liberties over dictatorship, and free speech over jammed radio stations, TV channels spewing out nothing but propaganda, closed-down newspapers and blocked Internet.

It’s such preferences, rather than a taste for foie gras and oysters, that constitute treason to be purged. This is bad news for everybody I know in Russia, who are all national traitors at heart. And the news for the West in 2022 isn’t much better than it was in 1938.

We desperately need our Churchills and de Gaulles. Instead we get Chamberlains and Daladiers, but without the intellect and integrity.

P.S. Tony ‘Anthony’ Blair helpfully illustrated my last point yesterday. He wrote: “More than two decades ago I met Vladimir Putin in St Petersburg. Back then, he was a Western-oriented leader, wanting to reform Russia.”

It appears that Putin only ever turns bad when his friends, such as Blair and Trump, leave office. Yet those two gentlemen should agree on a common chronology to avoid confusion.

Blair left Downing Street in 2007, Trump moved into the White House in 2017. That’s a gap of 10 years during which Putin became a villain, after and before periods of angelic goodness. The solution is evident: let’s bring Blair and Trump back, to see Putin again not as a Hitler impersonator, but as “a Western-oriented leader”.

“Back then”, Tony, Putin was a KGB officer duping his Western marks to turn them into his unwitting agents of influence.

Ideas Have Consequences, the 1948 book by Richard M. Weaver, is to American conservatism what Das Kapital is to Marxism.

I first read it some 10 years after writing How the West Was Lost, which is my defence against any hypothetical charge of plagiarism. But what interests me today isn’t so much the contents of the book as its title.

Since ideas are expressed in words, Weaver’s title can be profitably paraphrased into mine above. Words, especially those uttered by people with a wide following, do have consequences – even, perhaps especially, when they convey no ideas worthy of the name.

That’s why, at the risk of angering my American friends, I’ll continue to say that the sycophantic praise of Putin by Donald Trump and other Western ‘conservatives’ has done much to embolden the fascist in the Kremlin (or, these days, in his Altai bunker).

Trump is worshipped by Americans (and others) of the rightish persuasion for the same reason Putin is. People like Pat Buchanan happily agree with Trump when he says that Putin “is running his country and at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country.”

They look at their governments and feel a richly justified disgust. Hence the idea that anyone different from their awful politicians, especially if he is different in every respect, has to be good.

Such faulty logic explains the adulation of Trump in conservative circles – he is perceived as an outsider, which has to be ipso facto good. His admirers are willing to overlook Trump’s brutishness, vulgarity, ignorance and narcissism. More important, they refuse to acknowledge that Trump’s sycophancy towards Putin makes him an indirect accessory to the on-going carnage.

They defend their stand by saying that underneath it all Trump was tough on Putin. That’s why Russia didn’t attack the Ukraine on his watch.

Using the same logic, both George W. Bush and Barack Obama (in his first term) were great presidents too. After all, Putin didn’t attack the Ukraine during their tenures either.

Nor was Trump tough on Putin. His fans talk about the sanctions Congress imposed while Trump was in office, conveniently forgetting that Trump fought them tooth and nail. Those sanctions came into effect in spite of Trump, not because of him.

On the contrary, he desperately pushed for Russia to be readmitted to G7, a club from which Putin was blackballed after his 2014 bandit raid on the Ukraine.

Trump clearly saw Putin as his ally in their common grievance against the American ‘establishment’. That’s why, when everybody knew Putin had meddled in the presidential election, Trump was demanding that the Ukraine be investigated for that very crime. Funnily enough, Putin was demanding the same thing.

Trump even proposed to Putin that the two countries form a joint “cybersecurity unit” to combat “election hacking”. Putin and his retainers must have had a good laugh about that.

According to Trump, Russia “was right to be there [in Afghanistan],” an attitude that explains why he actively promoted Russia’s expanding influence in Syria.

And in response to others taking exception to Putin’s murders, Trump relied on the old moral equivalence defence: “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?”

In any case, as far as Trump was concerned, Putin’s complicity in any murders, such as the one of Litvinenko in 2006, was unproven. He said: “You know, and I’m not saying this because he says, ‘Trump is brilliant and leading everybody’ – the fact is that, you know, he hasn’t been convicted of anything.”

True. A jury of his peers has never found Putin guilty of any crimes. That means, according to Trump, he has never committed any. Why, even his massacre of Ukrainian civilians isn’t criminal on this criterion.

I can’t recall a single critical word Trump has ever uttered about Putin. I do recall countless times he said Putin was “a tough cookie”, “with great charm”, “smart”, “savvy”, “genius”, “strong leader” and some such.

As to Putin’s annexation of the Ukraine’s territory in 2014, Trump claimed Ukrainians welcomed it: “[Putin] is absolutely having a great time… Russia is like, I mean they’re really hot stuff… and now you have people in the Ukraine – who knows, set up or not – but it can’t all be set up, I mean they’re marching in favour of joining Russia.” (Sorry to be quoting at such length, but I can’t get enough of elegant English.)

Whatever Trump’s day job is, he shouldn’t quit it to become an intelligence analyst. His reading of that situation wasn’t quite accurate, wouldn’t you say? But especially relevant today are Trump’s two bookend statements on either side of Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine.

On 22 February, two days before the invasion, when the world observed Russia’s military build-up with horror, Trump had this to say about his fellow strong leader:

“But here’s a guy that says, you know, ‘I’m gonna declare a big portion of Ukraine independent’ – he used the word ‘independent’ – ‘and we’re gonna go out and we’re gonna go in and we’re gonna help keep peace. How smart is that? And he’s going to go in and be a peacekeeper. That’s the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen. You gotta say that’s pretty savvy.”

And yesterday Trump predictably condemned Russia’s atrocities – but again without saying anything critical about Putin personally. He did admit to a slight miscalculation on his part though:

“I figured he was going to make a good deal like everybody else does with the United States and the other people they tend to deal with – you know, like every trade deal… And then he went in – and I think he’s changed. I think he’s changed. It’s a very sad thing for the world. He’s very much changed.”

Before considering the content of that pronouncement, it’s worth commenting on its form. Trump has a tendency to repeat the same words or phrases over and over again within the same statement, which is worrying.

This is called ‘perseveration’ in psychiatry, and it’s usually a symptom of a brain injury or some other organic disorder. Perhaps Trump should concentrate on his own mental health more than he does on Biden’s (which too is cause for concern), and I don’t mean this facetiously.

But that’s by the bye. Important here is that Trump’s view of the world is strictly transactional. He sees every little problem in life as something to be solved by a trade deal. Rather than being a statesman, Trump is a horse trader and bean counter, a man whose sensibilities have been formed by negotiating with Atlantic City mafiosi.

Really worrying is that he believes Putin has changed. Indirectly there’s an aspect of self-vindication there. Trump seems to be implying that yes, he was Putin’s fan when in the White House. But then Putin at that time was ‘smart’, ‘savvy’, ‘genius’ and an all-around good chap who couldn’t see an old woman without helping her across the street.

Alas, when Trump left Washington, Putin changed overnight, by implication partly because Trump was no longer there to keep him on the straight and narrow.

This is arrant, dangerous nonsense – a vindication of Putin by other means and a lamentable failure to understand people, especially those whose interests go beyond ‘deals’.

“Words, words, words,” said Hamlet, meaning they didn’t matter. But they do.

Western politicians act with at least some regard for opinion at the grassroots. This has more to do with bono privato than bono publico, for pleasing the electorate is essential to staying in, or getting into, office. Hence they poll incessantly, trying to calculate the likely electoral response to this or that policy.

And as a rule, the grassroots don’t arrive at their opinions by study, contemplation and analysis. For their intellectual grass to grow, they require constant fertilising with words uttered by figures of authority.

When people held in high esteem, such as Buchanan and Trump, extol Putin’s virtue, that’s fertilising dust sprayed on the grass. This doesn’t mean that everyone on the receiving end will be persuaded – the word ‘everyone’ doesn’t belong in political discourse. But some people will be, and there may be enough of them to skew the polls so much that policy-makers will take notice.

Most conservatives, and I’m using the word loosely, intuitively reach out for authority. This is an echo of times olden, when people’s views on really important things were affected by church doctrine.

Buchanan, Trump and other Putin dupes have, for different and variously merited reasons, built up a capital of authority in such people’s eyes. They’ll take on faith what they hear from such prominent figures more readily than anything they read in The New York Times and The Washington Post, those mouthpieces of ‘liberalism’.

That’s why the inane, ignorant rubbish Trump mouths about Putin tickles the right nerve endings even for some people who have the mind to realise that what he says is indeed inane, ignorant rubbish. And that’s why I tend to be brutal on our own quislings who do Putin’s bidding by consistently saying nice, if mendacious, things about him.

They do untold harm by pushing a domino to create a knock-on effect reaching all the way to Westminster. Words do have consequences, which is why some are life-giving and some are borderline treasonous.

Millions of Ukrainians are facing death with the kind of courage one reads about in war novels but hardly ever witnesses first hand.

Thousands of Russian protesters come out into the streets, knowing that what awaits them is police truncheons, followed by torture in hellhole prisons.

That news editor who smuggled an anti-war poster into the studio during yet another propaganda broadcast on Russian TV, showed the kind of heroism that defies any pessimistic assessment of human nature.

And what is the West showing? Cowardice and hypocrisy.

The most glaring example of the latter was provided by the BBC in its Panorama programme. It was billed as an exposition of Abramovich’s criminality, which made me bewail yet again the abysmal quality of today’s journalism.

The word ‘exposition’ implies new information, new facts. Now, it would be tempting to toot my own horn by saying, references in hand, that I’ve been writing on the same subject, citing the same facts, since Abramovich first befouled London with his sordid presence.

So I have, but I possess no intelligence sources of my own. I didn’t meet witnesses in Moscow’s safe houses, and neither did I smuggle their taped reports out of Russia. Everything I’ve ever written about Abramovich came from books, dozens of them, where his rise from petty crook to Putin’s pet billionaire was documented in painstaking detail.

Hence for at least 20 years anyone with a few quid in his pocket has been able to pop over to Waterstone’s, pick up a book or two, and learn all there was to know about Abramovich and other Russian gangsters.

While at it, another, bigger, expenditure would have equipped our amateur sleuth with a small library of books on Putin and his gang. Such books contain exhaustive information on the evil KGB regime that picked up the relay baton from the communists to rob and tyrannise Russia, subsequently pouncing on her neighbours like a rabid dog.

Yet now not only ignorant philistines who have few interests beyond physical comfort, but even people who actually have read some of those books are feigning surprise. Putin is a monster, Abramovich is a criminal, Russia isn’t our friend – who could’ve thunk.

Where were you, ladies and gentlemen, in 1999-2000, when Putin’s gang was bombing Chechnya flat, reducing its capital to rubble? When Russian fascists were putting Chechen villagers into helicopters and pushing them out at 1,000 feet? When they shot, tortured and raped their way through that breakaway republic?

Where were you when they pounced on Georgia in 2008, annexing some of her territory and shelling her towns? In 2014, when they staged a bandit raid on the Crimea and chunks of eastern Ukraine? In 2015, when they began to use Syrian cities for target practice in preparation for war in Europe?

Where were you when the Russians declared – and waged! – hybrid war on the West? When they bought our politicians and hacks both retail and wholesale? When they used every possible media outlet, including some you yourselves have provided, to conduct an all-out propaganda assault on the West? When they attacked our electronic waves and corrupted our elections?

Where were you when Putin’s ghouls were murdering dissidents (including 156 journalists) at home and émigrés abroad? When they gave those truncheons a good workout whenever people protested, as they did across the river from the Kremlin in 2012? How dare you accuse Russians of staging only limited protests if you didn’t lift a finger when unlimited ones were stamped into the dirt?

Where were you when the Russians blackmailed the West with their energy supplies? When they openly laundered billions (trillions?) through Western financial institutions and property markets? When they used those laundered funds to buy up not only our palaces and mansions but also, more damaging, our newspapers?

Don’t bother to answer any of those questions. I’ll do that for you.

You were gleefully accepting the dirty money pouring into your coffers, turning them into cesspits. This, though you knew perfectly well that those banknotes were covered not only with slime, but also with blood.

You were seeking an accommodation with Putin’s kleptofascist gang, lying that Russia was on the road to virtue. You called for sympathetic understanding of Putin, an acknowledgement of Russia’s national interests.

You failed to react to Putin’s crimes with anything other than perfunctory sanctions and fulsome expressions of concern. Even when his murderers were eliminating his enemies in your capitals, you were willing to overlook overwhelming evidence and claim that Putin’s involvement was unproven.

Your politicians, even some currently serving, were playing lickspittle to Putin and his gangsters. People like Osborne, Trump, Mandelson, Biden, Macron, Merkel (you can extend the list on your own) were happy to engage in photographed foreplay with Deripaska and other career criminals. And former high-ranking politicians, like Chancellor Schröder and Prime Minister Fillon, avidly raked in Putin’s millions when serving on the boards of his thoroughly criminalised companies.

You’ve systematically and criminally destroyed your own energy industries, leaving your countries vulnerable to Putin’s blackmail. And you’ve achieved a similar end by reducing your armed forces to a risible level barely sufficient for performing even police functions.

You allowed the funds purloined from the Russian people or provided by the FSB (typically both) to buy up our institutions, such as banks, football clubs, charitable organisations and even newspapers. You elevated to the Lords – a key component of our government – a louche sleazebag who used his father’s KGB money to buy two London newspapers and then seduce our political elite with lavish parties and Lucullan feasts.

You obligingly provided your newspaper inches, nay feet, for Putin’s loathsome shills to bring their nauseating propaganda to our media, thereby legitimising lies designed to smooth the fascists’ way to greater power. You claim that those quislings were exercising freedom of speech, whereas in fact they were – still are! – spreading enemy propaganda.

You’ve allowed Putin to finance and direct a sort of Fourth International of marginal European parties on both right and left, doing exactly the same job as the previous three Internationals did: fracturing, subverting and weakening the West.

And now you’re hiding behind the smokescreen of claimed ignorance supposedly lifted by the BBC’s rehashing of facts long in the public domain. Moreover, you exacerbate your complicity in Putin’s crimes by cowering behind the technicalities of Nato articles to refuse the Ukraine protection from murderous bombings.

At the same time you are paying Putin $1 billion a day for his gas, financing the bombs and shells murdering Ukrainians.

You welcome the dawn of belated understanding, whereas in fact you’ve understood nothing and learned nothing. You quake in your boots at the slightest hint of a Third World War, refusing to acknowledge it’s under way already.

The Russians have set up 14 recruitment offices in Syria, enlisting Shahiba and other terrorists, thousands of them, as much-needed reinforcements for their efforts to kill as many Ukrainians as possible. Hezbollah, Hamas and Taliban militants will be next if the war lasts another fortnight.

It’s worth mentioning in passing that Putin, that flag-bearer for an Orthodox Third Rome, is happily recruiting Muslim terrorists in Chechnya and Syria to massacre predominantly Orthodox Ukrainians. I wonder what the Patriarch Kirill (known in the KGB annals as ‘Agent Mikhailov’) thinks about that.

The Ukraine doesn’t have to look for foreign fighters. She can barely arm the thousands of volunteers already beating a path to her door.

They come from France, Spain, Poland, Italy, Japan, US, Canada and other civilised countries. And I’m proud, vicariously, that 150 of our Paras are also fighting for our common freedom in the Ukraine.

Now I wonder how long it’ll be after the ceasefire before the West lifts all sanctions on Putin’s regime. Before it resumes its efforts to understand Russia’s legitimate concerns about those hordes of frightful Estonians who may sweep across the border to Moscow.

Judging by the performance of the Russian army in the Ukraine, they probably could.

P.S. Taking close to heart the advice ‘know thy enemy’, I watched a propaganda show on Russian TV yesterday.

And lo and behold, there was my erstwhile mate, the pianist Boris Berezovsky (not to be confused with the gangster of the same name garrotted in Surrey on Putin’s orders), five stone heavier than I remember him in London some 30 years ago, and even more cynical.

He was accusing the West of spreading lies about Russia, the Ukraine of having started the war to do Nato’s bidding (or the other way around, can’t remember), and every civilised country in the world of imposing sanctions that, however, will fail to defeat Russia’s indomitable spirit. Complaining that the Russians were unforgivably soft in their conduct of the war, he proposed the kind of steps that even made another guest, a captain in the Russian navy, warn against creating a humanitarian disaster.

Can’t help thinking that the Russians bumped off the wrong Boris Berezovsky.

In the summer of 1209, the Albigensian Crusade was gathering momentum. Béziers, a Cathar stronghold in Languedoc, was surrounded and about to be stormed.

The Crusaders were out to eradicate Catharism, an offshoot of the Bulgarian gnostic sect of the Bogomils. This was one of the deadliest heresies ever to threaten the survival of Christendom, quite on a par with Arianism in that respect.

Not to plunge too deep into theology, the Cathars were dualists. To them, there were two Gods, not one. The good God of the New Testament eternally fought the evil God of the Old Testament, with both enjoying equal status. The domain of the good God was the spirit, good when pure. The bad God ruled over the flesh, irredeemably and invariably evil.

One can hear the echoes of some Eastern doctrines there, such as Buddhism. Yet Buddhism was too far away to threaten Christendom. Catharism, on the other hand, was a rapidly growing malignant tumour in the very body of Europe.

That heresy contradicted the monotheistic essence of Christianity, putting the Church in jeopardy. And in those unsophisticated times, it was the Church, rather than Instagram, that was the cornerstone of our civilisation. So at peril there was more than just Catholic doctrine.

Pope Innocent III tried to explain to the Cathars the error of their ways, sending his legates and missionaries to Languedoc. The Cathars, whose religion was more Asian than European, responded in a way popular in Asia at the time. By way of saying ‘no’, they killed the legates and the missionaries.

Finally, in 1209, the Pope was left with no option but to announce a Crusade later named after Albi, the Cathars’ capital city. And so to Béziers.

The reshuffled demographics of the city featured a sizeable population of Catholics, whom the Crusaders wanted to get out of harm’s way. They offered them free passage out of Béziers, but the offer was firmly declined.

The Crusaders attacked, and it was clear Béziers couldn’t hold out for long. At that point, the soldiers asked the papal legate Arnaud Amalric how they could separate the wheat of the Catholics from the chaff of the Cathars.

His reply went down in history as an oft-quoted (if possibly apocryphal) aphorism: “Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.” Kill them all. God will claim his own.

Cruel though that advice was, it was practical. Since Catholics and Cathars were physically indistinguishable, the latter could have got away by pretending to be the former.

Béziers fell and most of its citizens died. But the aphoristic phrase, in various translations, lives on. It’s widely used today, mainly by people who don’t know its origin but fancy themselves as intrepid commandos. (Boys of all ages are often given to such fantasies.)

I’m sure even Putin must have heard the phrase – one can detect its inspiration behind his actions. Thus some may be tempted to equate his propensity for waging wars of terror with the Albigensian Crusade or other medieval conflicts. This only goes to show how dangerous it is to draw historical parallels.

The Crusaders believed, with ample justification, that their Church, and therefore their civilisation, was at stake. Hence those who think that civilisation was worth keeping must see their cause as just.

Had the Cathars prevailed, Europe wouldn’t have found the resolve to repel alien conquerors, at that time mainly Muslim. Houellebecq’s novel Submission would read not as a dystopic tale of an Islamic Europe, but as reportage.

By contrast, Putin’s cause is seen as just only by fascists, actual, vicarious or aspirational, wherever they crawl out of the swamp.

The existence of a free, westward-looking Ukraine in no way threatened the survival of Putin’s Russia and her civilisation, such as it is. The Ukraine could have joined the EU, Nato or for that matter a Pall Mall club, and Putin could still have continued unimpeded to suppress free speech in Russia, terrorise the few protesters, flog hydrocarbons and launder the proceeds, enriching his acolytes and impoverishing everyone else.

In the likely event the Ukraine had gone on to become freer and more prosperous than Russia, the Russians might have got restless. But Putin’s early career in the KGB’s Fifth Chief Directorate ideally equipped him with crowd-control tools.

That toolbox includes bullets, poison, concentration camps, torture, rubber truncheons – whatever the job takes. Putin’s CV should leave one in no doubt that he owns such tools and is more than willing to wield them.

All in all, his cause isn’t to save his country but to subjugate someone else’s. No way would Augustine describe Putin’s current war as bellum iustum, just war.

Those 1209 Crusaders made every effort to convert the heretics or, barring that, to save their own kind, the Béziers Catholics. Putin’s conduct is quite different.

The Ukrainians aren’t heretical or apostate Russians, but a separate nation with its own culture, language and history. Its roots are similar, though far from identical, to Russia’s, but then so are the roots of Britons and, say, Germans.

Anglo-Saxons originate from what today is Germany, which doesn’t entitle the Germans to bomb British cities, although at one point they did try. Nor is Britain entitled to bomb New Delhi because India used to belong to Britain.

Putin is making no attempt to save his own kind, quite the opposite. About 20 per cent of the Ukrainians are ethnically Russian, and east of the Dnieper that proportion is closer to a third. Thus at least 300 out of every 1,000 Ukrainians killed by Putin’s bombs are the very same ethnic Russians he claims to be protecting. And the bunker hermit has form in that gruesome endeavour.

In 1999-2000 Russian bombers wiped out Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. At least 80 per cent of its population were Russians, different in their language, ethnicity and religion from the Chechens.

That, incidentally, should put paid to any attempt to identify countries strictly by the blood mix of their inhabitants. No major nation can boast an ethnically homogeneous population, nor can many individuals claim to be ethnically pure. But that doesn’t mean that nations don’t exist – only that blood and soil nationalism is a pernicious chimera.

Nations are brought together by shared culture, history, customs, injunctions and, above all, self-perception. A Russian baby adopted and raised by an English family will grow up English, not Russian. He’ll prefer warm beer to cold vodka, restraint to emotional incontinence, and, if so inclined, he’d choose Dickens over Tolstoy, Shakespeare over Pushkin or – in extreme cases – Elgar over Prokofiev.

Putin is obsessed with another chimera, that of a Pax Russica, some mystical ‘Russian world’ uniting Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians and any other peoples he wants to conquer. They are all supposed to be the same family torn asunder by evil Anglo-Saxons.

If he genuinely believes that nonsense, his crime is even more monstrous. The arithmetic I mentioned earlier no longer applies: his own people add up not to 300 victims out of a 1,000, but to the whole thousand. He is carpet-bombing his own family.

Moreover, Putin is even attacking the escape routes, crowded with desperate Ukrainians of any ethnic origin, trying to flee from Russian fascism. No Albigensian chivalry there, no attempt to save his own kind from slaughter.

Killing people out of hand can’t be justified by anything other than a just cause. The Albigensians had that; Putin doesn’t. They tried to give their own people a chance to escape; he bombs their escape routes. He can’t be justified under any circumstances; they…

I won’t complete that sentence lest I may be accused of moral relativism or, eschewing political correctness, even Hottentot morality (“If I steal his cow, that’s not good. If he steals my cow, that’s bad.).

Yet it’s not I but human nature that’s morally relativist. Recognising this, the founders of our civilisation taught that evil though violence is, it’s justifiable if it prevents a greater evil. The violence of those Albigensian Crusaders falls into that category. Putin’s violence doesn’t. It’s just evil.

P.S. Speaking of moral relativism, while the West helps the Ukraine with one hand, it’s paying Putin $1 billion for his gas — every day. Something tells me that money won’t be used for social care.

My heartstrings have been tugged so violently, they are about to snap.

Seldom have I seen such a passionate, nostalgic declaration of love for the city of my birth, Moscow, and for “the old, kindly Russia, raped and murdered by Communists”.

In fact, I got so misty-eyed it took me a full five seconds to realise that Peter Hitchens was up to his usual tricks.

They follow, with nary a variation, the same pattern of almost mathematical quality. Today’s piece adorns the formula with soppy romantic touches, and no doubt some readers won’t see the forest of bias for the trees of lachrymose prose.

I sympathise with Hitchens. Unlike Putin, Lavrov, Soloviov et al., he can’t serve Putinesque panegyrics straight as they come. Their rancid taste has to be masked with treacly mixers to produce a cocktail his credulous readers can swallow without wincing.

The ratio has changed since the war started. Hitchens used to be heavy-handed when pouring his poison about Putin, the “strong leader” turning Russia into “the most conservative and Christian country in Europe”.

That sort of thing has been blown to bits, along with the bodies of thousands of Ukrainians. If people tasted such concoctions now, they’d spit them out in revulsion. Hence they have to be tricked by changing the recipe, made to believe their minds aren’t being poisoned.

The recipe always has the same ingredients, and I’m sorry to see an otherwise competent journalist being so formulaic.

First, plead emotional attachment to the Russia of “low, graceful old houses, trees and churches”. Within that tear-jerking narrative, slyly establish your bona fides as an expert by extolling “Russia, where I spent two of the most astonishing years of my life”.

Second, put up a shield to ward off the slings and arrows shot by those who can see through the ploy: “And if you think, as some spiteful people do, and have said, that I do all this because I am in Russian pay… then you are terribly mistaken.”

Since I’ve been writing about Hitchens’s Putinophilia for at least 10 years, I must be more spiteful than most. For the record then, I’ve never written that Hitchens is a paid agent of influence. What I have said on a few occasions is that I struggle to imagine how different his writing would be if he were.

Third, put those spiteful people to shame by establishing a family history of British patriotism: “My father (who hated Stalin and all his works) ferried tanks to the Soviet Union on the terrible Murmansk convoys…”

Alas, that intrepid Hitchens père didn’t do a good job bringing up his sons. The talented sibling Christopher remained a flaming leftie to his dying breath, while Peter himself was a Trotskyist well into his thirties. Then again, Trotskyists hated Stalin too, so perhaps there’s no contradiction there.

Hitchens’s preamble out of the way, it’s time to deliver, as if in passing, the real message “that Western stupidity helped to bring it [the war] about.”

For once I’m ready to nod enthusiastically and shoot up my thumb, rather than the customary two fingers. I too think it was Western stupidity that emboldened Putin, but my understanding of that failing is the opposite of Hitchens’s.

He has been dutifully parroting Putin’s line about Russia feeling threatened by the likes of Estonia joining Nato. That’s bilge and, if you want to know why, just look up any of my earlier pieces on the same subject.

By contrast, my charge of the West’s criminal stupidity uses real evidence: negligence in failing to prepare for confrontation with Putin’s evil regime; failure to understand that Putin’s regime is indeed evil; corrupt eagerness to launder Russian trillions without any due diligence; suicidal energy policy, delivering a strategic advantage to evil; rampant decadence, which made Putin see the West as a soft touch.

I consider the West stupid because it has failed to do so many right things. Hitchens considers the West stupid because of something it has done right: offering the Nato umbrella to small nations threatened by a fascist regime.

Then comes a bit of disinformation, with a contortionist pat on Hitchens’s own back: “I keep telling you that Russia isn’t strong. This stupid, brutal war has proved it.”

Disregarding Hitchens’s stock claim to oracular insights, “this stupid, brutal war” is proving exactly the opposite.

Russia is much stronger than the West because she is prepared to fight and take horrendous casualties, and the West isn’t. She is also ready to wage a war of total annihilation, while the West will offer anything, including abject surrender, to avoid one. Russia is prepared to use first-strike nuclear weapons, while the West wouldn’t even consider such a possibility. Even its readiness to launch a retaliatory strike is in doubt.

A mendacious cause can’t be propped up with impeccable logic. Hitchens proves that by serving up an obvious lapse.

If Russia is as weak as he says, then surely we must do all we can to help those heroic Ukrainians slay the fascist monster? Hitchens disagrees.

Because Russia is so weak, the West, according to him, must surrender. We should “do nothing to extend or prolong war, for the longer and deeper the war is, the more people will die and be maimed.”

What exactly is it that we do and should stop doing? We are not, after all, sending our soldiers into battle, and we aren’t lifting a finger to protect Ukrainian civilians from murderous carpet bombing.

We are helping Ukrainians with arms, finance and logistic support. We are helping (not very eagerly, it must be said) those millions of Ukrainians fleeing from Europe’s “most conservative and Christian” murderers. We are trying to downgrade Putin’s war effort with economic sanctions.

If we follow Hitchens’s thinly veiled prescription and desist from all that, evil will conquer. The Ukrainians will again be “raped and murdered” by the heirs to the same regime Hitchens used to love as a grown-up man.

I only wish he spared us the sentimental tosh about people getting killed and maimed. We are all weeping for them – and I perhaps more than most, for the war is directly affecting members of my family, both in Kiev and Moscow.

But Hitchens has forfeited the right to vent such emotions. He has been playing Quisling to Putin’s Hitler for too long for his protestations to produce any other than an emetic effect.

He and his likeminded colleagues have done much to create a pro-Putin bias in our society, especially its margins on both right and left. Now that Hitchens’s “most conservative and Christian country in Europe” has uncapped a gushing well of Ukrainian blood, some of those scarlet drops have fallen on his hands.