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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.