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If we go strictly by official post, then Sergey Lavrov’s closest Nazi analogue was Joachim Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister during the Second World Special Operation.

Yet Lavrov forfeited any claim to being a top diplomat, indeed a diplomat at all, in 2008, when our Foreign Secretary David Miliband had the gall to question Russia’s record on human rights.

Showing an enviable command of the English language, if some disdain for diplomatic protocol, Lavrov replied: “Who the fuck are you to lecture me?” What happened to “This is outside my remit, but I’ll look into it”? Or, more committal, “We’ve progressed in that department since Stalin’s time, so let’s talk that trade deal”?

In a way, that was honest of Lavrov. He communicated to the world in no polite terms that his job was propaganda, not diplomacy.

And in that field Lavrov is guided by the observation first enunciated by Dr Goebbels. “The English,” he said, “follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.”

That comment was meant to be critical, but Lavrov took it as a call to action. The more brazen a lie, he realised, the more likely would people be to believe it. Thanks for the tip, Joseph.

It must be said that Lavrov is striking powerful blows for the notion of unremitting progress. Though taking his cue from Goebbels, he has outdone the old master many times over. And at the same time, he has proved Marx wrong.

Commenting on the contemporaneous situation in France, Marx wrote that history appears twice: first as tragedy, then as farce. Lavrov, however, shows that these two genres don’t have to be practised consecutively. They can happily coexist side by side.

Yesterday I mentioned his farcical comment on Russia’s geopolitical plans. “We aren’t going to attack any other countries,” he said. “We didn’t attack the Ukraine either.” Could have fooled me.

But didn’t Russia sign a pledge to guarantee the Ukraine’s territorial integrity? When a journalist posed that question, Lavrov pointed out his mistake: “If you’re talking about the Budapest Memorandum, we have not violated it. It contains only one obligation – not to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine.”

He sounded so convincing that I had to look up the text of that document. And sure enough, the first obligation mentioned in the Budapest Memorandum is “to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.”

Never mind casuistic details. In fact, explained Lavrov, “We want a friendly Ukraine”. No doubt that’s true. It’s just that Russia’s approach to making friends strikes me as somewhat unconventional.

Not that I propose to hold myself up as an example to follow, but when I wish to befriend someone, I don’t beat him to a pulp first, then murder his whole family and set his house on fire. Yet I’m willing to admit that Lavrov has garnered a deeper understanding of human relations.

Even though Russia didn’t attack the Ukraine, Lavrov helpfully explained why she did. The reason for invading the Ukraine, he said, was that the US was using her “territory to create a biological weapon, and an ethnically targeted one at that”.

Those dastardly Yanks are devilishly clever, and I’m using the word ‘devilishly’ advisedly. They are on the threshold of developing pathogens that kill Russians, while sparing Ukrainians. I wouldn’t put such deviousness past them, but there’s a slight snag there.

How can those viruses distinguish between the two groups if, as Lavrov’s immediate superior has explained a thousand times, the Russians and the Ukrainians are the same people?

Well, they are, except that, according to the official belief, the Russians are uniquely blessed with an extra gene of spirituality. One has to infer that the Yank virus is designed to zero in on that special gene, which indirectly proves it exists.

But how will that satanic weapon be delivered into the bloodstream of uniquely spiritual Russians? Lavrov neglected to go into such technicalities, which oversight was helpfully corrected by Gen. Konashenkov, Defence Ministry spokesman:

“We were particularly interested in the detailed reports that the US was using the Ukraine’s territory to conduct experiments in spreading pathogens through wild birds migrating between the Ukraine and Russia.”

I wonder what the Geneva Convention has to say about avian terrorism. If those nit-pickers haven’t yet got around to banning birds, they should. And while they are contemplating the necessary steps, the NSPCA should issue a ringing denunciation of this mass cruelty to avian Americans.

But let’s forget such WMDs for the time being. According to Gen. Konashenkov, they are still in development. What about the real bombs levelling Ukrainian cities, burying thousands under the rubble, including women and children?

Trust you to ask such provocative questions. One can tell you don’t watch Russian TV, especially Vladimir Soloviov’s programme on the First Channel. He is one of the propagandists trying to rival Lavrov for the honour of being the Russian Goebbels.

Though I’m sure Lavrov will win in the end, if only by pulling rank, Soloviov is doing his level best. Yesterday he laughingly advocated a “bang! and everything turns to dust” scenario as a way of telling Nato to mind its own business.

Yes, but what about those Ukrainian women and children? Oh well, if you insist.

You see, those Judaeo-Banderite Ukie Nazis are bombing their own cities to besmirch Russia’s otherwise stainless reputation. And, though the Russians would never carpet-bomb residential areas, thousands of Ukrainian women and children are dying because Ukie Nazis are using them as human shields.

Some 70 to 80 per cent of the Russians support Putin’s Special Operation, which means they deserve Putin. But they do have a mitigating circumstance: Lavrov and his ilk are lying not only externally but also domestically.

The idolised Russian warrior (Special Operator?), Suvorov, once said: “Every soldier must know his manoeuvre.” He might have practised what he preached, but Col. Putin’s men made sure Russian soldiers went into the Ukraine as blind as newly born kittens.

They were told to expect a cakewalk, followed by a victory parade. That’s why they only carried rations for two days in their knapsacks. The saved space was filled with dress uniforms, to be worn on parade grounds.

The general impression conveyed by the domestic lies was that any problems likely to be encountered called for police action only. Thus, close to a quarter of the invading contingent were not soldiers, but either policemen or internal troops, equipped with a large consignment of rubber truncheons and crowd-control shields.

When the shooting started in earnest, those men had to be retrained as infantry, which fast-tracked programme ideally prepared them for acting as sacrificial lambs. And speaking of those sacramental animals, some Russian pilots were also tricked.

There are many reports of the parachutes of ejecting Russian pilots failing to open. Accidents do happen, one or two. But when there are many more, one has to suspect they aren’t exactly accidental.

Apparently, the Russians deliberately equipped novice pilots, those most likely to be shot down, with faulty parachutes to make sure they couldn’t act as future witnesses for the prosecution.

Japanese kamikaze pilots leaving their parachutes on the ground before taking off come to mind, but with one salient difference. They knew they were flying suicide missions. No one had lied to them they could safely bail out if hit.

I hope that Lavrov (and Putin’s other bandits, including the bunker hermit himself) will end up treated to either Goebbels’s cyanide pill or Ribbentrop’s noose. I’d even be willing to let him choose.

Her Majesty’s Government has finally moved to sanction Roman Abramovich, mainly known in Britain as the owner of Chelsea FC. The sanctions involve the freezing of all his UK assets, including Chelsea FC.

Now, though Abramovich shows a lamentable deficit in basic human qualities, such as decency and morality, he has plenty of street smarts.

Sensing that the sanctions were coming, he has been desperately trying to sell Chelsea FC. Yet moving a club valued at somewhere between two and three billion isn’t easy, especially when one is in a hurry.

A free tip for HMG: Abramovich and some of his fellow Russian ‘oligarchs’ started flogging their assets weeks before Putin pounced on the Ukraine. To an outside observer (well, me), this looks suspiciously as if they knew the invasion was on the cards, but kept that knowledge among themselves. That makes them directly complicit in Putin’s war crimes, a charge compared to which their corrupt ways look positively innocuous.

Chelsea FC has been left rudderless and penniless. The club isn’t allowed to sell tickets and merchandise, to sign any contracts, including those for players, to spend more than £22,000 for travelling to away matches (good news for EasyJet). Above all, selling it becomes problematic because Abramovich isn’t allowed to receive any payment for Chelsea FC, never mind three billion.

Since the will to sell is evident, I’m sure a way can be found. Off the top, HMG could nationalise Chelsea FC, sell it off to the highest bidder and use the proceeds for providing armaments to the Ukraine.

If we can confiscate the property of known drug dealers, we must have laws to do the same to gangsters directly complicit in mass murder. Should this prove impossible, Chelsea FC could well go bust, and you won’t see me shedding tears.

All I can offer to the crestfallen fans is a compendium of clichés, such as “what goes around, comes around”, “you make your bed, you lie in it” or, to please some of the more upmarket supporters, “tu l’as voulu, George Dandin”.

For me, the plight of Chelsea FC serves as an antiemetic. For ever since Abramovich acquired the club in 2003, I’ve been suffering from acute nausea every time those smug fans sang his name at matches.

They couldn’t even claim they didn’t know where Abramovich’s money came from, although some did try. That’s like the Germans saying they didn’t know about Nazi concentration camps or the Russians pleading ignorance of Stalin’s crimes. If they didn’t know, they didn’t want to know. Therefore they are guilty not just of stupidity, but also of complicity in evil.

Had I felt any residual pity for Chelsea fans, I would have lost it yesterday, when their team played its first post-Abramovich match away at Norwich. Those cynical morons were singing “There’s only one Roman Abramovich”, stressing yet again their unwavering commitment to money, regardless of its source.

Here I can’t resist drawing the oft-drawn, not to say overdrawn, parallel. What if the Second World War had ended in a draw, and a Nazi businessman bought Chelsea FC in 1943 with the proceeds of selling the property of murdered Jews? Would the fans have been as ecstatic? I bet they would.

“I told you so” isn’t my favourite genre, but I’ve been writing about Abramovich off and on for years, starting on 4 September, 2012. Most of that had an aspect of preaching to the choir: the facts of Abramovich’s rise from petty larceny to building an empire were in the public domain. Hence all decent people were as appalled as I was.

Those who refused to learn the facts were contemptible. Those who knew the facts and still welcomed Abramovich to London were beneath contempt.

Abramovich made his first billion in 1995, when he and his partner Boris Berezovsky made a killing from the elaborate robbery of the Russian people known in the annals of crime as the loans-for-shares programme.

Without going into too much detail, they used government loans to pay $200 million for the oil company Sibneft. Since the company was worth $2.7 billion at the time, that was like buying money at a huge discount.

The discount wasn’t as huge as it looked though. For Abramovich admitted later that he had paid billions in bribes to government officials and protection money to gangsters. Still, considering that Sibneft produces about $3 billion’s worth of oil annually, that deal paid off handsomely

Abramovich’s and Berezovsky’s next target was the aluminium industry, and in his book Godfather in the Kremlin Paul Khlebnikov described that move in some detail. He specifically mentioned some owners of smelting plants who were reluctant to sell at a knock-down price and then suffered fatal accidents.

One such befell Khlebnikov himself. He was machinegunned from a moving car in the centre of Moscow, which, if you ask me, is a rather extreme type of literary criticism. The late editor of the Russian Forbes didn’t cite any hard evidence of Abramovich’s involvement in ‘wet work’, but his hints were broad enough.

Yet a man doesn’t live by corruption alone, not in Russia at any rate. American gangsters bribe politicians; Russian ones create them. That’s why I am dismayed at the shoddy coverage of Abramovich’s “links with Putin” in our press.

Chaps, but for Abramovich, if Putin wanted to see the inside of the Kremlin he’d have to buy a guided tour. For Abramovich was a key player in the feat of political legerdemain known as ‘Operation Successor’ – to President Yeltsyn, that is.

Those obsessed with Abramovich’s Western residences worth billions are overlooking one of his former residences that cost him nothing. Yet without that freebie he wouldn’t have bought his £150 million palace in Kensington.

For in 1996 the Yeltsyn family invited Abramovich to move into an apartment inside the Kremlin. By then he had become a key member of that cabal, widely described as ‘the Family’, in the Cosa Nostra sense of the word.

Besides Abramovich, the Family included Yeltsyn’s daughter Tatiana Dyachenko, her second husband Valentin Yumashev and Boris Berezovsky. It was the Family that launched Operation Successor, when Yeltsyn’s lifelong attempt at suicide by booze was about to triumph.

The Family chose Putin, a relative newcomer to national politics. Unlike the likelier KGB candidate, Prime Minister Primakov, Putin was willing to offer immunity to Dyachenko and Yumashev, and believe me: there was plenty to immunise them against. That clinched the deal, and the button for a delayed-action bomb was pushed.

Neither Abramovich nor Yumashev was Berezovsky’s intellectual equal, but both were more ‘street’. Thus, having acted as Pygmalion to Putin’s Galatea, they fell in love with their creation, or at least wisely pretended to. Having quickly realised the dimensions of the power acquired by the KGB colonel, they happily assumed subservient roles.

Both have flourished since then. Yumashev has been Putin’s trusted advisor all these years, which, aside from wielding political influence, means he has become a billionaire. And Abramovich was allowed to keep and multiply his billions, provided he loosened his purse strings whenever Putin was a little short.

But Berezovsky’s hubris got the better of him. He thought Putin would become his poodle, rather than the other way around. That miscalculation drove Berezovsky into his British exile, where in 2013 he lost his life to a garrotte. The coroner passed an open verdict, probably encouraged to do so by HMG’s reluctance to rock the boat.

As for those imbecilic fans of Chelsea FC, they got that wrong: there’s more than one Roman Abramovich. Putin’s close entourage consists of dozens of such acolytes, each covered head to toe in Ukrainian blood.

No, they never killed anyone personally, gangland style. But then neither did Vlad Putin.

P.S. Putin’s Foreign Minister Lavrov made an odd statement yesterday. “We aren’t planning to attack other countries,” he said. “We didn’t attack the Ukraine either.” In other words, “We won’t attack other countries like we didn’t attack the Ukraine”.

“A wave of anti-Russian hysteria is sweeping the West,” complains Brendan O’Neill of The Spectator, and in some ways he is right.

For example, some Dutch concert venues are cancelling performances of works by Russian composers who all predate Putin by a century or so. That’s indeed hysterical, and a nuanced argument could well be made against such overreaction.

My nuanced argument would revolve around my wife Penelope who is a concert pianist. One of her programmes for this season includes Prokofiev’s Third Sonata, and she’ll be damned if she removes it. In fact, having at times found myself (deservedly!) on the receiving end of her wrath, I don’t envy any concert organiser who’d dare make such a suggestion.

Prokofiev died in 1953, when little Vova Putin was a babe in arms (not to be confused with an armed barbarian). Hence it would be hard, though clearly not impossible, to blame the composer for the thermobaric bombs murdering Ukrainian civilians.

There is an issue of individual guilt and collective responsibility to consider as well. Anyone who believes in free will should hesitate to blame a large group en masse, irrespective of individual culpability.

And I bet many Russians abhor Putin’s crimes as much as I do. However, all bets are off at wartime. Much as we may deplore it, collateral damage is unavoidable.

A pilot bombing an armament factory might regret the deaths of hundreds of workers, many of them apolitical or even oppositional. But he will still push the ‘bombs away’ button with a sense of righteousness.

These days one hears more bromides about the war than can be found at John Bell & Croydon, London’s largest pharmacy. One of them is that most Russians are decent people who have nothing to do with Putin and his crimes.

That’s lazy, crepuscular thinking, with a heavy dose of ignorance thrown in for good measure. Even forgetting for a moment de Maistre’s adage about every nation getting the government it deserves, most Russians definitely deserve Putin.

Throughout his kleptofascist KGB reign, Putin has received wide domestic support. Even accounting for the profusion of stuffed ballot boxes, Putin has also enjoyed solid electoral support as well.

Bemoaning the treatment of most cultured Russians would have a more solid basis. Without running a poll, I’d venture a reasonably educated guess that much of the Russian intelligentsia is opposed to Putin. Yet even there I’d refrain from saying ‘most’.

Anyway, this is a possible subject for discussion. But not when it’s discussed with O’Neill’s refreshing ignorance and intellectual paucity.

He bases his argument on the plight of the Russian conductor Valery Gergiev, “one of the greatest in the world by all accounts”. Following Putin’s attack on the Ukraine, Gergiev has lost all his numerous jobs in the West, which O’Neill thinks is just awful.

Music, writes O’Neill, is apolitical, and an artist’s political views shouldn’t matter. Really? Music may be apolitical, but the way it’s used by despots certainly isn’t.

Since O’Neill clearly knows nothing about music, he probably has never heard any of the names I’m about to drop: Furtwängler, Mengelberg, Strauss, Gieseking, Cortot, Schwarzkopf. These are some of the great musicians who were denazified after the war, with their careers blighted or even destroyed.

When accounts are settled after a major cataclysm, some basic precepts of fairness often fall by the wayside. Thus Furtwängler was treated more harshly than Karajan, even though the former was much less culpable than the latter.

Furtwängler (for me, the greatest conductor who has ever lived) was no Nazi, but his signature did adorn a few articles about German music being superior to the Jewish kind. He had a point, in that German music is superior to any other, but those articles weren’t really about music. Yet at the same time Furtwängler did his best to save Jewish members of his orchestra.

Karajan, by contrast, was a Nazi through and through. He joined the Nazi party twice, first in his native Austria, then in Germany. When at his concerts he espied Hitler in the government box, Karajan arranged the public in the shape of the swastika to please the great man.

Was that apolitical? No? Then let me assure you that music is used for political purposes in Putin’s Russia as much as it was in Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s USSR.

Putin has an inner circle of sycophantic court musicians, such as Bashmet, Matsuev, Spivakov – and Gergiev. In fact, Gergiev’s name belongs at the top of that list.

In his eagerness to play lickspittle to monsters, Gergiev has outdone not only Furtwängler but even Karajan. That testifies to his loyalty: he and Putin have been close friends since the early ‘90s, when Putin served as KGB overseer to Petersburg’s mayor Sobchak, and Gergiev was beginning to make his bones on the concert circuit.

Gergiev has delivered openly propagandistic concerts in Ossetia and Syria, dedicating his performances to Putin’s conquests, while publicly praising the dictator for his capacity to instil fear. He has endorsed with genuine enthusiasm the annexation of the Crimea, along with every oppressive practice in Russia.

In 2014 Gergiev added his signature to the letter enthusing about Putin’s first foray into the Ukraine. We, said the signatories, “firmly declare our support for the position of the president of the Russian Federation”.

As a result of his devotion to Putin, Gergiev has acquired inordinate political power in Russian culture. Hardly any cultural event, to say nothing of musical ones, happens without his – which is to say Putin’s – endorsement.

His rewards far exceed those even extremely successful musicians can expect. According to Corriere della Sera, Gergiev’s property holdings in Italy alone are worth £150 million, and that’s but a drop in the ocean of his wealth. He is an oligarch of music, dealing in timber, oil and God knows what else.

That leaves little time to devote to music, other than conducting facile mockeries of sublime compositions. “One of the greatest in the world by all accounts”? No musician in the world, nor any serious music lover, would be able to suppress a derisory smile reading that.

In his prime, Gergiev was a good jobbing conductor, nothing much better than that. But his prime is long since past. He has become a musical money-grabbing ‘oligarch’ who would happily conduct a marching band, as long as the cheque didn’t bounce.

Even if he were indeed one of the world’s greatest, Gergiev’s performances would still be dreadful, considering that he hardly ever rehearses. He typically blows into town an hour before the concert, then spends the next hour and a half in his room talking to various financial consultants.

When the public begins to slow-calp, Gergiev generously agrees to climb the podium, where he spends the next hour or so going through the motions. He then collects his fee and hops on the plane to fly to the next venue.

Now he has been dumped by everybody, whinges O’Neill, including his management team, which nonetheless described him as “the greatest conductor alive and an extraordinary human being with a profound sense of decency”.

If this is the account O’Neill goes by, he clearly doesn’t understand the role of impresarios in today’s musical world. Such chaps are as likely to say that their client is a genius as a used car salesman is to swear that “she’s not gonna give you any trouble at all”.

“McCarthyism is an overused word, I know,” writes O’Neill. “But really, what other word will do to describe the sacking of a conductor for refusing to publicly denounce the leader of Russia?”

May I suggest ‘long overdue justice’? Or ‘good riddance to bad rubbish’?

And yes, McCarthyism is indeed an overused word. But those who overuse it are invariably as bad at thinking and writing as Gergiev is at conducting. Brendan O’Neill is a case in point: the blighter doesn’t even know not to split his infinitives.

I’d like to conclude by shouting “Let’s go, Brendan!” My American readers will understand this is no compliment. The rest of you, just take my word for it.

The Ukraine isn’t going to get her Polish Mig-29s, even though the transfer was agreed. But then Poland’s feet got cold, with those of US and British positively turning to ice.

The Russians are busily using their air supremacy to massacre Ukrainian civilians. They are losing some planes and helicopters to SAMs and AA fire, but the losses aren’t exorbitant.

Hence President Zelensky is begging Nato to enforce a no-fly zone over his country, which entreaties are met with thunderous applause in both Parliament and Congress.

However, once those claps of thunder die out, the governments of both countries explain that complying with Zelensky’s plea would risk an all-out war with Russia, and we can’t have that, can we now? Awfully sorry about those strafed children, old boy, but no can do.

At that point Occam’s razor came out of its sheath, cutting through the fog of obfuscation with a simple solution. If Nato doesn’t want to fly sorties over the Ukraine, perhaps the Ukraine could do so herself.

You see, Poland’s air force still uses Soviet-made Mig-29s, and it so happens that Ukrainian pilots were trained on that very kit.

So they begged for the tools to do the job, and Poland was happy to oblige. She currently has 28 Mig-29s, about 20 of which are air-worthy. These planes aren’t as state-of-the-art as Russian Migs and SUs, but, as the old adage goes, the best plane is one flown by the best pilot.

Ukrainian fliers are confident of their ability and, above all, morale. Hence, when the Poles offered to transfer all their usable Migs to the Ukraine, the Ukrainians were ecstatic.

Nor would the transfer have denuded Poland’s own defences, for the Americans offered to give the country a brand-new F-16 for each Mig the Poles flew to the Ukraine. That way Poland would upgrade her own air force at no cost, while doing the right thing.

It was understood that the Migs would take off from Polish airfields, but that’s where the Poles’ feet froze. The Russians, they feared, might get cross and retaliate against Poland.

Thence came a transparent subterfuge. Poland offered to put the Migs at America’s disposal, with the Americans then getting them over to the Ukraine from their Ramstein base in Germany.

That’s where Americans drew the line. Poland, they said, is welcome to do whatever she wants with her Migs – as long as she doesn’t drag “the entire Nato alliance” in. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby dismissed the plan: “It is simply not clear to us that there is a substantive rationale for it.”

Our Transportation Secretary Grant Shapps agreed wholeheartedly: “It is important I think that we are a defensive organisation. Which means we won’t be getting directly involved in the war.”

A substantive rationale, Mr Kirby? How about the indiscriminate massacre of Ukrainian civilians?

Remember how concerned the US was 23 years ago about the genocide of Kosovars by Milosevic’s troops? On 24 March, 1999, Nato’s air force bombed Serbian targets (including the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade) to stop the on-going atrocity.

Why not do for Ukrainian Christians what you did for Kosovar Muslims? Oh well, I quite understand. Serbia didn’t have nuclear weapons and Russia does. No good poking that particular hornet’s nest.

A defensive organisation, Mr Shapps? So let’s defend ourselves, shall we? Let’s stop pretending that Russia’s offensive plans don’t extend past the Ukraine.

If Shapps still labours under that misapprehension, I suggest he watch any Russian TV channel for five minutes, picked at random. Russian Goebbelses will explain to him in simple words even he can understand (provided there’s an interpreter handy) that the Ukraine is merely the first battlefield of Russia’s war on Nato, which is to say the West, which is to say America and Britain especially.

That means a world war is already under way, and we deceive ourselves by pretending it isn’t. The longer we keep up the pretence, the weaker will be our strategic position when Russia leaves us no option but to fight.

Betrayal is indeed in the air. And Hungarian chief Orbán has inhaled that aura with both lungs.

Yesterday he announced that Hungary would not allow anyone to transport arms for the Ukraine through Hungarian territory. And there I was, thinking Hungary was a Nato member, not Putin’s best friend.

I jest. Orbán is indeed Putin’s friend and disciple, and he is busily creating a mafioso state patterned after Putin’s Russia.

In fact, I’ve seen reports showing that Orbán’s career has been financed by the FSB from the very beginning. That sinister organisation had what the Russians call kompromat: blackmail material based on Orbán’s dealings with the Russian capo di tutti capi, Semyon Mogilevich, who lived in Hungary for years.

Be that as it may, having initially made some perfunctory statements against the war, Orbán has since been sabotaging arms supplies to the Ukraine. I’m sure Putin has promised to reward his loyalty with plenty of discounted gas.

Ukrainian heroes have put up such stubborn and brilliant resistance that Russia’s disjointed ground offensive has stalled. It’s reasonably clear that Putin has only one reliable route to victory: carpet bombing the Ukraine flat, thereby breaking her fighting spirit.

Potentially that could result in millions of civilian victims, a scale of monstrosity even Milosevic couldn’t approach. Yet Joe Biden is hiding behind a technicality when he says that the US would only defend “every inch” of every Article 5 country.

The countries he has in mind are the Baltics, the three Nato members probably next on Putin’s hit list. It so happens that they were admitted into Nato in 2002, while the Ukraine’s application was rejected in 2008.

That technicality is too flimsy to hide behind. If Putin is allowed to bomb the Ukraine into submission, possibly even resorting to nuclear weapons, the Baltics’ turn will certainly come next. The Russians would then have all the momentum, leaving Nato only two options.

Option 1 will be to fight, risking a nuclear Armageddon. Since Russia outnumbers Nato ten to one in tactical nuclear weapons, Nato would have to go strategic, and something tells me Messrs Biden, Johnson and Macron aren’t the kind of leaders who could do that.

That leaves only Option 2: abject surrender and the dismantling of the system of collective security that has so far protected the West adequately. In effect, the West would welcome Russia into Europe with both arms open and flung up in the air.

The risk of a cataclysm would be much lower now, if Nato were to hand those Migs to Ukrainian pilots and wish them Godspeed. For betraying Ukrainian civilians, leaving them to their gruesome fate, is worse than immoral. It’s not going to work.

The dictionary defines jingoism as “extreme patriotism, especially in the form of aggressive or warlike foreign policy”. Yet what interests me now isn’t the meaning but the origin.

The word comes from ‘by Jingo’, a euphemistic oath coined at a time when taking God’s name in vain was still considered ill-advised. Though ‘Jingo’ transparently stood for ‘Jesus’, it was less likely to incur divine retribution.

Apparently, the expression first entered the English language in 1694, in a translation of François Rabelais’s 16^th century novels Gargantua and Pantagruel.

Rabelais was a brilliant satirist who could never be accused of excessive piety. Hence his work abounded in obscenities, scatological and sexual allusions, swearwords and oaths based on divine personages. The expression par Dieu! in particular appeared on practically every page, but for the English the literal translation was off limits at the time.

Thus, when Rabelais’s giants and their jester Panurge started cracking their witticisms in English, they replaced that objectionable phrase with a politically (religiously?) correct ‘by Jingo!’

The phrase is still occasionally heard in England today, but it owes its staying power not to Rabelais, but to an 1878 song belted out in English pubs. Interestingly, it first appeared in a context eerily similar to today’s Ukraine.

That was the time of yet another Russo-Turkish war, and the Russians had just routed Ottoman troops in the Battle of Plevna, in Bulgaria. The road to Constantinople and the Straits seemed open, but Britain strongly discouraged the Russians from taking it.

British drinkers translated that geopolitical stance into a song that made up in gusto what it lacked in poetic technique:

“We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do,/ We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too,/ We’ve fought the Bear before, and while we’re Britons true,/ The Russians shall not have Constantinople.”

That was an unmistakable reference to the Crimean War some 25 years earlier, when a relatively small expeditionary force made up of British, French and Turkish contingents wiped the peninsula with the Russian army. The Russians fighting in Bulgaria took the hint, stopped their advance, and the Ottoman Empire hung on for another 40 years.

The first two lines of the rhyme offer infinite possibilities for parodic bowdlerisation. Thus, when Mussolini was about to invade Abyssinia in 1935, Punch mocked Britain’s impotence: “We don’t want you to fight but by Jingo if you do,/ We will probably issue a joint memorandum suggesting a mild disapproval of you.”

(As an unrelated aside, when Abyssinia changed her name in the 1940s, Englishmen of a certain class indulged their propensity for puns by replacing ‘goodbye’ with “Abyssinia, as they say in Ethiopia.” I can testify that my father-in-law still said that in the 1980s.)

The 1935 version seems especially relevant today. Yet again Russia is on a collision course, this time with Nato (and therefore Britain), not the Ottoman Empire. Yet again the West has sworn off any direct military involvement. Instead Western countries are responding with delayed-action economic sanctions, arms supplies to the Ukraine – and ubiquitous expressions of variously deep concern.

That’s why it’s time to take the old jingle off the mothballs, dust it off and put it to good bowdlerised use. Let’s see what we can do to develop the 1935 version of the first line: “We don’t want you to fight but by Jingo if you do…”

I can offer a few starters for ten, each based on cold indifference to, and ignorance of, the rules of versification.

“… We’ve got no men, nor any money, but we’ve got the ships (two).”

“… We’ll impose sanctions on your men and take their loose change away to spite you.”

“… We’ll ban your men, we’ll impound their money and their ships (yachts, to you).”

“… You can kiss your Eurovision good-bye, you KGB perverts, and we’ll enforce a no-fly zone over Heathrow, for you.”

“… We’ve got the will to fight you to the last drop of Ukrainian blood and your oil, and bully to you.”

“… We’ve got the words, but no guns, no ships, nor much money we can spare for you.”

Well, I’m running out of steam, and urgent help is needed. Please come up with your version of the second line, as I’m sure your mastery of rhyme and metre is superior to mine. A glittering prize awaits: a glowing mention in this space.

Stand warned though that I’ll entertain no entries featuring stronger oaths than ‘by Jingo’, nor any obscene references (however richly deserved) to Boris Johnson, Joe Biden or Peter Hitchens. You are welcome to rhyme “…do” with “… you”, provided you don’t precede it with the word I’m trying to avoid during Lent.

On second thoughts…

This slogan was inscribed on the banners of the November Uprising (1830-1831), when the Polish people rose against the tyranny of the Russian Empire. And it was echoed by Russian protesters who knew their freedom was also at stake.

Yesterday the same words could be seen displayed by Russian demonstrators, 4,500 of whom got badly roughed up and then arrested. They could, many probably would, be charged with treason and go to prison for up to 15 years.

Last night I had dinner with several Russians, one of whom still lives in Moscow. Unable to fly back due to European sanctions, she is stuck in London for a while. Her brother, on the other hand, is still there and a few days ago he demonstrated against the war, losing his three front teeth to a police truncheon.

I’m sure you see today’s parallels with 19^th century Poland, not that I was subtle in drawing them. However, before I put my pencil and ruler away, there’s another historical parallel begging to be drawn.

But first let me ask you this question: On what date did the Second World War start? Most people who have been to school (ideally not a British comprehensive) won’t hesitate to reply: 1 September, 1939. Those who played truant when history was taught, are welcome to cheat and look it up on Google. The answer will be the same: 1 September, 1939.

Yet a contemporaneous European wouldn’t have known that. He would have opened his morning papers, had a sip of his coffee, and read that what started on that day was nothing like a world war. It was merely a local conflict. Or perhaps a Germano-Polish war, if you’d rather.

Things became clearer on 3 September, when Britain and France declared war on Germany. The people realised then that a world, or at least European, war had been going on for three days, and they hadn’t even known it.

Six years and 60 million victims later they became aware of the full scale of their initial error – the lesson had been amply illustrated by visual aids and KIA notices. But they didn’t learn it, remaining to this day as ignorant as they were on 1 and 2 September, 1939.

Now is the time for all these parallel lines to intersect, against the dicta of Euclidean geometry, on the point of the Ukraine, c. 2021.

The other day President Zelensky issued a desperate appeal to Nato to enforce a no-fly zone over the Ukraine. The Russians are using their air supremacy, he said, to do to Ukrainian cities what they had done to Grozny and Aleppo. Rather than launching precision strikes on military targets, they are indiscriminately murdering civilians, including those running for their lives away from the beleaguered cities.

Nato said no. It knew exactly how to enunciate that monosyllabic word, having gained much valuable experience when Putin’s stormtroopers occupied a chunk of the Ukraine in 2014.

Boris Johnson explained that doing what Zelensky asked meant that one day Nato planes would have to engage Russian Migs. That would be risking a Third World War, which tragedy must be averted at all costs.

I agree with every word of that sentence, but not its tense and mood. A Third World War should have been avoided at all costs. Now it’s too late. It has already started.

It’s not just for the Ukraine that heroes there (and their Russian supporters) are risking life and limb. They are filling with their blood the moat separating barbaric savagery from what’s left of our civilisation.

The ditch is neither deep enough nor wide enough. Sooner or later Putin’s hordes will ford it, and then we’ll have to fight willy-nilly – from a strategic position infinitely inferior to today’s.

Nor is it a far-gone conclusion that Putin’s air force would engage Nato’s over the Ukraine – and even if it did, that wouldn’t necessarily lead to a wider conflict. A case in point, if I may.

In May 2018, 40 US commandos engaged a large force of Syrian attackers, killing up to 300 of them, with no American casualties. They then found out that most of those Syrian soldiers weren’t exactly Syrian. They were Russian mercenaries from the Wagner group, run by Putin’s friend Yevgeny Prigozhin.

In this context, the word ‘mercenaries’ doesn’t paint the customary picture of a freebooting soldier exchanging his blood for pay. The Wagner group is an extension of the Russian Spetsnaz, taking orders directly from Putin.

At the time those bandits were taught their lesson, many Western politicians were anticipating Putin’s reaction with trepidation. Yet none came. As far as Putin was concerned, nothing untoward had happened.

It’s likely that, should the better trained and equipped Nato pilots engage Putin’s planes, or even shoot a couple down, no button for a major escalation would be pushed. On the contrary, such a show of strength and resolve could stop a world war in its tracks.

For make no mistake about it: the war juggernaut is already rolling and gathering speed. The Baltics and Poland are next on the list, possibly even nuclear strikes on Nato targets. We just don’t know it, or rather pretend we don’t.

The men in the White House and Downing Street think this kind of pretence equates prudence. It doesn’t. The only thing it equates is irresponsible brinkmanship.

If they think that Putin will stop at the outer borders of the Ukraine, they are deceiving themselves – and us. Here’s another history lesson they skipped: tyrants must be taken at their word.

They tend to state their plans with proud clarity. Thus Lenin wrote before the Bolshevik coup that he planned to drown Russia in the blood of a civil war. And Hitler wasn’t exactly reticent in his Mein Kampf (published in 1925) about his plans for European Jews. Later those villains proceeded to do exactly what they had promised, to the accompaniment of incredulous gasps in the West.

Putin and his mouthpieces have made no secret that the Ukraine is only the first target in their crosshairs. The carnage of Ukrainian civilians is the first battle in the war Putin’s evil regime has declared on the last vestiges of Western civilisation.

Hence those heroic Ukrainians (and a handful of Russians protesters) are fighting not only for their freedom, but ours as well. Their victory would also be ours, but so would be their defeat.

I hope our spivocratic leaders will realise this sooner or later. Rather than preventing a world war, their craven vacillation is a guaranteed way of losing it.

No, not my own. The lies in question are being told in our press by Putin’s agents of influence, witting or unwitting.

Rod Liddle is less pernicious than some of the others because he speaks from the heart only. He doesn’t pretend to make a cogent argument, which does him credit. Liddle laudably heeds Dirty Harry’s advice: a man must be aware of his limitations.

That’s why he simply leaves ignorant statements hanging in the air, expecting (not without foundation, it has to be said) that his readers are even more ignorant than he is.

Thus he bemoans in today’s Times the campaign against Abramovich, one of the men directly responsible for Putin’s arrival in the Kremlin, who has since then combined the functions of Putin’s poodle and moneybag.

“It is not Abramovich’s financial dealings that have caused the problem,” writes Liddle, “it is his nationality.” A credulous reader is expected to infer that Abramovich’s financial dealings have been pristine, and he is merely a victim of visceral British Russophobia.

Now, a small library of books have been written on the variously criminal ways in which Abramovich et al. came by their billions. Putin’s People is the most recent one, but I could think offhand of at least another half a dozen, in both English and Russian.

I strongly suspect Liddle hasn’t read any of them, preferring instead to remain in a state of blissful ignorance. That, of course, is these days no obstacle to pontificating on serious issues, but Liddle isn’t to blame for this cultural collapse. I suspect he’s at base a good chappie who is regrettably misguided.

Peter Hitchens is a different animal altogether. For one thing, he is an egomaniac, which Liddle is not.

Hitchens claims oracular powers he supposedly acquired during the few months he spent in Russia back in the nineties and several flying visits since then. There’s a good Russian saying about people like him: “He lies like an eyewitness.”

“I know” is the anaphoric leitmotif of his writing on that subject. To wit:

“I know too much. I know that our policy of Nato expansion – which we had promised not to do and which we knew infuriated Russians – played its part in bringing about this crisis.”

That’s a lie: the only thing Nato promised on paper was not to site bases in East Germany, which undertaking has been kept. Some Western politicians might have spoken out of turn, but in international relations this doesn’t amount to a binding promise.

Meanwhile: “I know that Ukraine’s current government, now treated as if it was almost holy, was brought into being by a mob putsch openly backed by the USA in 2014.”

Speaking that way about a genuine popular uprising for freedom and against Putin’s puppets is, kindly speaking, crass. But I especially like the word ‘putsch’, Hitchens’s stock shibboleth he has been using ever since the Ukraine won her independence.

The word is designed to evoke Nazi associations, which is consonant with Kremlin propaganda. Putin’s line, echoed by Russian TV every minute of every day, is that the Ukraine is in thrall to Banderite fascists. (Hence Putin kicked off his monstrous crime by announcing he was out to “denazify” the Ukraine.)

This is another lie. Fascisoid parties do exist in the Ukraine, as they do in most other countries, including Britain. However, rather than running the country, they command a mere two per cent of the vote and not a single seat in parliament. Fascist sympathisers are much better represented in the Hitchens household, for the stigma of fascism belongs much more naturally on Putin’s forehead.

That’s not all Hitchens knows: “I know that the much-admired President Zelensky in February 2021 closed down three opposition TV stations on the grounds of ‘national security’…  I know that the opposition politician Viktor Medvedchuk was put under house arrest last year on a charge of treason. Isn’t this the sort of thing Putin does?”

No, it isn’t. This is yet another lie. Putin has completely suppressed free speech and has murdered, by the latest count, 156 opposition journalists. If the Medvedchuk case is all Hitchens and his ilk can dredge up to claim that Zelensky is no better, he deliberately misleads his readers for nefarious purposes.

I shan’t repeat what I wrote on this subject a few days ago: http://www.alexanderboot.com/whats-worse-than-a-moron/. Suffice it to say that not since Lord Haw Haw has there been a media personage as deserving of a treason charge as Medvedchuk. That he has only been put under house arrest is a lapse into weak-kneed liberalism.

After that lies begin to come in a steady stream: “In a country crammed with Russians, they were trying to make Russian a second-class language.”

About 20 per cent of the Ukrainians are of Russian origin, which hardly amounts to cramming. Many of them are courageously fighting Putin’s stormtroopers, while hundreds of thousands of others are fleeing from, not to, the Russians.

As to Russian being a second-class language, that’s a lie too. What Hitchens means is that Ukrainian is the language in which all official business is transacted. Looking at NHS leaflets printed in 28 languages, I wish we displayed a similar commitment to our linguistic heritage.

Linguistic uniformity is an essential unifying factor for a nation, especially one that acquired its sovereignty as recently as the Ukraine. That doesn’t prevent all the Ukrainians I know, and I know quite a few, from being bilingual, whichever language was their first.

The fact that the Ukraine’s president is a bilingual Jew whose first language was Russian should be sufficient to debunk accusations of both Nazism and linguistic oppression – but not for pro-Putin fanatics.  

Now comes the clincher: “And they were teaching history which often had an anti-Russian tinge.” Crikey. Fancy that.

Why would they do a Judaeo-Banderite Nazi thing like that? It wouldn’t be because the Russians deliberately starved millions of Ukrainians to death in 1931-1932? Or because they have historically suppressed Ukrainian culture, language and national identity? Shouldn’t Ukrainians be allowed a teensy-weensy bit of rancour? No, perish the thought.

Having told us what he knows, Hitchens tells us of the pain he suffers at the hands of detractors, such as, well, me: “I am accused of being a ‘Russian shill’ or even a traitor, of parroting Russian propaganda, or things of that kind. These insults make little impact on me personally because I know they are not true.”

If Hitchens has taken any of my statements as insults, I am sorry. They were meant as dispassionate factual statements.

I don’t know what he knows deep in his heart. I only know what he writes: shilling, sycophantic propaganda of Putin’s kleptofascist bailiwick, which to Hitchens “is hardly not the most conservative and Christian country in Europe”.

As we speak, that ‘conservative Christian country’ is indiscriminately bombing civilian quarters. hospitals and schools in Europe’s second-largest country desperately fighting for her freedom. It is committing mass murder in an attempt to spread its evil all over Eastern Europe, for starters. It is threatening nuclear annihilation to the world, including Britain, which Hitchens professes to love so much.

Shilling for that evil monstrosity at this time is in itself evil. Technically speaking, that doesn’t constitute treason: we aren’t at war with Russia yet. Hitchens knows this, as he claims to know so many other things. And he is hiding behind that technicality the way Putin is hiding in his bunker.

Yes, says Christo Grozev, head of Bellingcat, the Holland-based international consortium of investigative journalists specialising in fact-checking and open-source intelligence.

Bellingcat has proved its credibility by reporting on the Syrian Civil War, the occupation of Donbas and the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, the El Junquito raid, the Yemeni Civil War, the Skripal poisoning and many other flashpoints of recent years.

Bellingcat has earned the right to have its reports treated with utmost seriousness, no matter how apocalyptic they sound. That’s how I took its report this morning, although ‘serious’ doesn’t begin to describe it.

Over the past few days, I’ve been trying to figure out why Putin is cowering in his bunker, hundreds of miles from Moscow.

Having gone over several possibilities, I finally settled on the most plausible one: Putin is preparing a nuclear strike, which could put Moscow in harm’s way. Hence he moved his command centre as far away as sensible.

That was pure conjecture on my part, based on Sherlock Holmes’s principle: if all plausible options but one are rejected, then the remaining one, no matter how unlikely, has to be true.

My hope was that such doomsday scenarios would never leave the realm of purely academic ratiocination. Alas, that hope has turned out to be forlorn – or is about to.

This morning I watched a Russian-language interview with Christo Grozev, who has spent years in Russia, cultivating sources close to the Kremlin. He is understandably reticent about releasing any information that could endanger his informants, only vouchsafing that they are high-ranking officers in the army and the FSB.

According to them, about 10 per cent of those meriting that description are opposed to Putin’s warmongering brinkmanship. That stands to reason: even in Russia officers seldom rise to such heights by being stupid, and intelligent people have to see how tragic the current situation is for the world in general, but especially for Russia herself. Thus they are willing to cooperate, if only to absolve themselves of Putin’s crimes.

Mr Grozdev is fully aware that some such conduits may be used for pumping disinformation. That’s why he and his colleagues verify and crosscheck every report many times over, and only ever release their findings when the veracity of their sources is no longer in doubt. So far everything they have reported has been borne out by facts.

“Almost a year ago,” says Mr Grozev, “I received some credible-sounding information that things would change in Russia in 2022. That it would be like nothing we’ve seen before, that Russia would become a dictatorship. That Russia would be North Korea 2.0 and journalists would be jailed and the free media (well, the remaining islands of free media) would be shut down. And that the country would become an army or it would run like an army.”

All that has already happened or is in train. Russia’s last two quasi-independent broadcast channels have been shut down. Wartime censorship has been introduced, and a law has been passed threatening up to 15 years in prison for anyone spreading “fake news” about the war. Since it is the military censors who will decide what constitutes fake news, any Russian voicing the slightest opposition to Putin’s monstrosity will end up in a prison camp.

Bellingcat’s reports on impending war with the Ukraine have also been confirmed by subsequent events. At the time Mr Grozev first received such information, about nine months ago, he wasn’t satisfied that its source was unimpeachable: “Again, this was a source we couldn’t use but it scared us, and it forced us to look for the data that would support or disprove this.”

His sources report that Putin has gone to war solely for internal political reasons. With the Russian economy plummeting and anti-Putin sentiments soaring, he and his clique have decided on the time-proven diversion strategy: war. That was the only way for them to cling on to power.

It was Herzen (d. 1870) who said that the strongest chains binding the people are forged from victorious swords. Yet if the swords don’t emerge victorious, they can have the opposite effect, hastening the tyrant’s demise. Hence Putin has to win this war at any cost, no matter how exorbitant or diabolical.

How diabolical can it get? The same sources have provided an affirmative answer to the question in the title. According to them, Putin will definitely use tactical nuclear weapons.

Moreover, his targets won’t be in the Ukraine: such an action might conceivably lead to a mutiny in his own army, brainwashed to believe in the sacred kinship between Russians and Ukrainians. Mr Grozev is certain that it’s Nato targets that are earmarked for nuclear treatment.

These could be in the Atlantic, where strategically vital communications cables interlink Nato members. Even more likely, battlefield nuclear warheads will be used to attack Poland, which has turned its airfields into Ukrainian air force bases. In any case, Putin’s shelling of Europe’s biggest nuclear power station shows he doesn’t share our fear of the atom’s destructive power.

Should that attack happen, how would Nato respond? Other than expressing even deeper concerns, that is? If true, these reports re-emphasise the craven idiocy of Nato leaders, Biden and Johnson above all, who have assured Putin that a military response to his aggression against the Ukraine was off the table.

That was an open invitation for Putin to invade – and then continue to up the stakes thereafter. Since the US and Britain have already broken the promises of the Budapest Memorandum, Putin has no persuasive reason to believe they’ll honour Article 5 of the Nato Charter either.

The verb ‘escalate’ comes from the French word for stairs, and Putin is climbing them step by step. He puts his foot on the next step to decide whether it’ll bear his weight. Satisfied that it will, he continues to climb, and so far Nato has missed every opportunity to make him stumble.

We’ll do anything, whimpers Nato, to avoid a nuclear war. ‘Anything’ is a voluminous word, covering, inter alia, abject surrender on all fronts. We are prepared to live in shame, without honour and indeed freedom, to make sure we do live.

By now parallels with Chamberlain, Daladier and Munich have been drawn so often they’ve become trite. Yet the trouble is that such parallel lines are visibly defying Euclid and vindicating Lobachevsky by converging.

Appeasement didn’t work then and it won’t work now. It increasingly appears that we won’t be able to avoid war no matter how prudent and compliant we are. All we can achieve is having to go to war later, and in a weaker strategic position.

We can all hope that Christo Grozev’s sources are wrong or even deliberately misleading. Hope springs eternal and all that. Yet I invite you to join me in praying that our strategic stance rests on a firmer foundation than just hope.

TV presenter Jeremy Vine got in trouble for doing his job well.

During a phone-in on his morning show, a gentleman with a strong northern accent shed a tear for those poor Russian soldiers led to slaughter by Putin’s lies.

Such empathy is a laudable sentiment, and indeed watching those weeping Russian POWs, some of them barely post-pubescent, is heart-rending. And didn’t Christ tell us to love our enemies? Of course he did, and his commandment echoed through that phoned-in comment.

As it did, more truly if less obviously, through Mr Vine’s reply: “But the brutal reality is, if you put on a uniform for Putin and you go and fight his war, you probably deserve to die, don’t you?”

The northerner exploded in a fit of fury. They are just innocent conscripts! How can you say that?!?

After that the comments came in thick and fast. “What a pathetic excuse for a human being. This guy needs taking off the air,” ranted one viewer. Another fumed about “rancid and vile comments from Vine.”

Before I make moral points, a factual one is in order. Two-thirds of Russia’s armed forces aren’t conscripts but professional contract soldiers (kontraktniki in Russian). But that’s a minor quibble. After all, in our egalitarian times people don’t have to be familiar with the subject to pass a strong opinion on it.

Yet Mr Vine’s detractors are wrong not only factually, but also morally – while his “rancid and vile comments” are consistent with Judaeo-Christian morality.

Christian love of one’s enemy doesn’t presuppose pacifism. It only means that we must pray for the souls of our enemies in heaven. Yet first things first: the order of the day is to make sure they get there – but with an important proviso.

Killing is justified only in the context of just war. That was first made explicit by St Paul: “But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.” (Romans 13:4)

Thus killing evildoers is God’s work for, as Mr Vine put it, “they deserve to die”. St Paul’s was the first saintly advocacy of Jeremy, but far from the last.

The Christian doctrine of just war naturally spun out of St Paul’s teaching. Its most consistent exegetes were St Augustine of Hippo and, centuries later, St Thomas Aquinas.

Augustine writes in his City of God: “They who have waged war in obedience to the divine command, or in conformity with His laws, have represented in their persons the public justice or the wisdom of government, and in this capacity have put to death wicked men; such persons have by no means violated the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill’.”

And, “But, say they, the wise man will wage Just Wars. As if he would not all the rather lament the necessity of just wars, if he remembers that he is a man; for if they were not just he would not wage them, and would therefore be delivered from all wars.”

Since Russian servicemen are waging an unjust, criminal war, they are personally responsible for every Ukrainian killed, every block of flats, kindergarten or school blown up, every desperate person leaving everything behind and trying to run away from the carnage. (Millions of them, mostly Russian speakers, are running towards the West and away from Russia. Don’t they know that Putin has come to defend them?)

Only fools, knaves and Messrs Hitchens, Farage et al. agitate against the justness of the Ukraine’s cause. But if some decent people still harbour doubts on that score, they should consider that yesterday heavy Russian artillery shelled Zaporozh nuclear power station, the biggest in Europe.

Mercifully, the resulting fires were contained before they reached the reactor. But Putin’s aim was clear. He wanted to create a nuclear disaster 10 times worse than Chernobyl, which, depending on the wind direction, could have irradiated not just the Ukraine but also most of Europe or much of Russia, possibly all the way to Moscow.

I can’t easily discern any moral or legal difference between that evil crime and the actual use of nuclear weapons. If anyone still thinks that Putin would have qualms about resorting to such doomsday armaments, he has another think coming.

The other day I tried to understand why Putin is cowering in his Altai bunker. One possible explanation, I suggested, is that he is planning to launch a nuclear strike and, knowing that a retaliation would come, wants to hide away from Moscow. His yesterday’s attempt to commit yet another crime against humanity makes that explanation plausible.

While we are on the subject of morality, Joe Biden should stop wearing his Catholicism on his sleeve. Instead he should consider his handling of the situation in light of basic human decency, never mind Christian doctrine.

Allow me to recap: he had known for weeks that Putin’s criminal assault was coming. The rest of us feared, doubted, hoped for the best – but he knew. His ironclad intelligence sources had unimpeachable informers: the families of Putin’s henchmen who lived in the West.

There are hundreds of them, sons, daughters and wives of Kremlin bandits, and their daddies and husbands had to forewarn them. Get out, liquidate the assets, take all the cash out of the bank, buy Bitcoin – that sort of thing.

As any intelligence operative will tell you, when hundreds of people know a secret, it’s no longer a secret. Moreover, some of those westernised Russians might have gone native, enough to have their loyalties divided. Staying on the right side of Western authorities would have been important for such people.

Hence Biden and his Nato colleagues didn’t have to indulge in guesswork like the rest of us. They knew for sure – and yet didn’t take any preemptive measures, beyond their hackneyed expressions of deep concern. The only thing they did was assure Putin that no possibility of military response was on the table come what may.

The first tranche of sanctions should have been imposed, in a staggered mode, the moment they knew the invasion was definitely coming. By way of avuncular advice, Putin ought to have been told that the first tranche would have follow-ups. Each step in the direction of the Ukraine would be punished by new, more draconian sanctions – including the ultimate one: trade embargo on Russian hydrocarbons.

Perhaps Putin would have thought twice before ordering the invasion. Even if he hadn’t, at least the sanctions would have had some more time to bite deep into the flesh of the Russian economy, undermining the war effort.

As it is, the ultimate sanction hasn’t been imposed even now. European countries continue to pay cash for Russian gas while, even more incomprehensibly, Americans continue to import Russian oil. The Western allies are punishing Putin’s war with one hand and financing it with the other.

So yes, by all means let’s pray for the souls of everyone killed in this war, Ukrainian, Russian or other. But at the same let’s make sure our moral compass isn’t going haywire.

Because those Russian soldiers are dying for an unjust cause, they deserve to die. Jeremy Vine was right about that.

P.S. I’m looking forward with eager anticipation to Hitchens’s Sunday column. What excuse for Putin will he concoct next? My guess is, it’ll be based on moral equivalence. We bombed Belgrade and invaded Iraq, so what’s the difference? I’ll answer this question when he actually poses it. For the time being, I’m just trying to preempt another attack on our intelligence.

“Dear Vlad,

“Haven’t heard from you in a while, hope you’re in good health. How’s the weather in, or rather under, the Urals?

“Is Alina with you, you lucky bastard? I’ve always fancied that girl, she’s well fit, as they say in these parts.

“Hope you aren’t cross with me. I admit I’ve been rather beastly to you over these past few days, but hey, if your friends don’t point out your mistakes, who will?

“Yes, I know you don’t make mistakes, ever. But your advisers do. Moreover, they lie to you.

“They told you it would be a cakewalk, the Ukrainian army would fold within hours. It hasn’t yet, a week later. They said Ukrainians couldn’t wait to topple the Judaeo-Nazi Banderite clique that oppresses them. Not the case: Judaeo-Nazi Zelensky is polling at 98 per cent support.

“They promised the world would respect you more if you spanked those Ukies with vacuum bombs. Instead, even your friends, like that Hungarian chap, have turned against you.

“And now those ‘experts’ whinge that you’ve painted yourself into a corner. You’re stuck in a war of attrition you can’t really win, blah-blah-blah.

“Oh, you can occupy Kiev and the rest of the Ukraine, after you’ve bombed it flat, I know you can. But what happens next? You don’t have enough soldiers to garrison every Ukrainian city, town and village. And even if you did to begin with, those Ukie guerrillas will be reducing their numbers every day. Sniper fire, bombs, mines, poison, pitchforks – you know the drill.

“Meanwhile, the garrotte of sanctions will be tightening on the Russian economic throat, with Soviet-style queues returning to shops, and the Russian natives getting restless as they push wheelbarrows full of banknotes. Even your nearest and dearest may be upset about losing their yachts, and God only knows what they’ll put into your tea.

“Anyway, you know all this better than I do. What you may not know is how to get out of this mess with your realm intact and your bloated face saved.

“Basically, you want, as we Russians put it so elegantly, both to ‘eat your fish and sit down on a dick’. (“Have your cake and eat it”, in the limp-wristed Anglo-Saxon phrase.)

“Now you’re going to find out who your friend really is, who has your interests close to heart. It’s me, and I’m going to tell you how to get out smelling like roses and whistling a merry tune.

“Remember how you resigned presidency to your stooge Medvedev in 2008? You still called the shots of course, but he stayed on as figurehead president till 2012. And then you rode your white steed back in and made yourself president for life, or damn near. You with me so far?

“Something like that can work a treat again. Here’s what you do.

“Have your doctors issue a health bulletin, saying you are – temporarily! – incapacitated. Your designated successor pro tempore then declares a cease-fire in the Ukraine and calls a snap election in Russia, which he’ll win (you don’t need me to tell you how to make sure he does).

“But you’ll have designated him specifically because you’ve struck a deal with the chap – similar to the one Yeltsyn struck with you back in 1999, but with a twist. Your successor will guarantee immunity for you and your family – that’s Step One.

“Step Two, he’ll announce that you were affected by high doses of steroids interfering – temporarily! – with your judgement. You are now being treated by the best doctors in Russia, which is to say in the world, and there’s every hope you’ll recover and enjoy a long and prosperous retirement.

“Meanwhile he’ll order withdrawal from the Ukraine and announce a new dawn of Russian democratic goodness. No to war, strife and hostility, he’ll shout at every opportunity, yes to peace, friendship and trade. You know what will happen next, don’t you?

“The Ukies will have got the message and stopped playing silly buggers with Nato and EU. The Ukraine will finlandise, Finland will ukrainise, Eastern Europe will plead undying friendship.

“Westerners, including those bloodthirsty Anglo-Saxons, will lift most sanctions. They’ll be falling over themselves buying your oil and gas, commissioning that pipeline, extending credits, transferring technology, rebuilding Russia, Lend-Lease-style. How good is that?

“Take my word for it, Westerners, all of them homos married to transsexuals, like nothing better than getting fat on the peace dividend. They won’t disarm straight away, now you’ve scared them witless, but give them a few years and they will.

“Remember how that perestroika op worked? You can do it again, better.

“Depending on how you structure that deal with your successor, you could do either of two things. You could indeed quietly enjoy your retirement and your billions, playing with Alina, your children and grandchildren (provided you know which is which). That’s what I’d do, but I’m not half the man you are.

“You want to change history, and more power to your elbow. So here’s the other option.

“Give it a couple of years, let things quiet down a bit, and then your successor can call another snap election that you’ll win (you don’t need me to tell you how). Back to the Kremlin you go, Stalin’s your uncle, Gorby’s your aunt.

“Will those Anglo-Saxons and other vermin see through that ploy? Of course they will. They may be dumb, but they ain’t stupid, as they say in that country you call Enemy Number One. But they’ll be happy to pretend they haven’t cottoned on, just to have a few more quiet years.

“Take my advice, Vlad, and you’ll win in the end. Keep me posted how you get on – and give my love to Alina, once you’ve finished giving her your own.

“As ever,

“Alex”

P.S. (To you, not Vlad). This war is a cloud with no silver lining. Still, it’s nice to have a week with Greta receding into the background, and without Boris yapping about net zero emissions.