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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.

Yesterday President Biden delivered a rousing State of the Union address, in which he screamed defiance on behalf of the Ukrainian people.

Alas, that’s not exactly how it came out. “Putin may circle Kiev with tanks,” said Biden, “but he’ll never gain the hearts and souls of the Iranian people.” Visibly exasperated Kamala sitting behind Biden whispered “Ukrainian”, trying to withhold the expletive fully formed in her mind.

An easy mistake to make, Joe. Especially when one is senile. I do wish, however, that the man supposed to lead the free world in adversity had fewer senior moments. I also wonder whether it was Biden’s easily diagnosable feeble-mindedness that set one of the traps for Putin, of which there were many.

All the traps have now slammed shut, piercing Putin’s ankles with their sharp teeth. He has got caught up in his own folly. Having taken what he thought was a calculated risk, he miscalculated badly.

Putin thought this would be a war he couldn’t lose. Instead, he found himself in one he can’t win. Nor, in all likelihood, can he get out of it and still stay in the Kremlin (if he is ever planning to leave his Altai bunker).

Strategic planning has to proceed from a set of assumptions. Ideally, they should all be based on hard intelligence, but ideals are seldom attainable in this world. Hence every strategist must make a raft of judgement calls based on his interpretation of facts and ability to ponder imponderables.

Putin’s judgement calls have gone awry. He made the mistake of believing his own propaganda about the West and, especially, the Ukraine. Credit where it’s due, his propagandists got the West almost right. Most of their assumptive boxes could be ticked with a blue pencil. Yet ‘almost’ and ‘most’ are the key words.

The West is decadent. Tick. Its leaders are self-serving and cowardly. Tick. They are scared out of their wits that they might have to go to war. Tick. Westerners are materialistic. Tick. They’d rather let Putin have the Ukraine than see the price of energy go up. Tick, but a paler one. They’ll never rouse sufficient public support for imposing stiff sanctions on Russia. Ti… Er, not quite. That’s where that ‘almost’ came in.

The West by its nature is reactive, not preemptive. Western countries are indeed so soft that they’ll exhaust every possibility not to take action before actually doing anything. Rather than piercing a boil, they’ll let it fester. All true. Yet Putin didn’t count on the bandwagon effect.

Once the bandwagon of indignation started rolling at an ever-increasing speed, everybody jumped on it. The same politicians who yesterday talked about understanding Putin’s problems and only reacted to his crimes with statements of ‘deep concern’, today are destroying Russia’s financial system with real sanctions and shipping tonnes of war hardware to the Ukraine.

How long this high will last is hard to say, and predicting the withdrawal symptoms is even harder. But at least there is some high now, and Putin hadn’t counted on that, not to the same extent. Yet this is a relatively minor miscalculation compared to his blunders in assessing the Ukraine.

Yesterday Putin’s Goebbelses proudly boasted that the Russians are advancing into the Ukraine faster than the Nazis did in the summer of 1941.

It’s good to see that they’ve set themselves a gold standard to emulate. But if I were in charge of Russian propaganda, I’d avoid encouraging my opponents to draw such parallels, not that they need much encouragement. That aside, today’s situation is different.

In 1941 most Ukrainians saw the Nazis as deliverers, meeting them with flowers and the traditional bread and salt. Moreover, the first shots many retreating Soviet soldiers heard were fired not by the Wehrmacht, but by Ukrainian nationalists, picking off Russians from cellars and attics.

Putin also expected flowers, bread and salt. Instead he walked into a hail of bullets. He found to his horror that he had taken on not the Judaeo-Nazi Banderites of his own propaganda, nor even just the Ukrainian army, but the Ukrainian nation, united as never before.

Whatever divisions between the country’s largely Polonised West and mostly Russified East existed have been erased by an upsurge of Ukrainian patriotism. Putin counted on divisive sedition – he banged his head against national unity instead.

Extremists can be shot out of hand, armies can be routed, cities can be flattened. But a nation of 40 million heavily armed people united in their hatred of the invader and his accomplices can’t be defeated. (For references, see Vietnam.)

Assuming for the sake of argument that the Russians manage to take Kiev and install a puppet government led by Yanukovych or a similar quisling, what happens next? If not Putin himself, then certainly his generals have to be asking that question, only to realise that they don’t like any of the possible answers.

You can terrorise into submission a nation of middle-class burghers, but not one of suicide bombers and guerrilla fighters. And that’s what any occupation regime will have to contend with in the Ukraine.

Sooner or later, the Russians will have to leave, seen off by curses and bullets. That will sever the wires pulling their puppets up, and they’ll collapse onto themselves.

While we are on the subject of nations, I’m sick of hearing the bromides about the Russian government but not the Russian people being responsible for the carnage. Wishful thinking, chaps.

Vindicating Joseph de Maistre, the Russians have exactly the government they deserve. Moreover, it’s a government whose crimes they endorse.

Reliable polls show that 68 per cent of respondents support Putin’s war, and only 22 per cent oppose it. Twenty-six percent believe the aim of the war is to protect the Russophone population of Eastern Ukraine, while 20 per cent think the objective is to prevent Nato bases in the Ukraine. And 20 per cent don’t care one way or another. They are just desperate to cling on to their philistine comforts, meagre to begin with and rapidly dwindling away.

Public protests in Russia, while not nonexistent, are anaemic. Only a few thousand have come out, defying police truncheons and threats of treason charges. Millions of others, however, are more scared of those truncheons than Ukrainians are of tanks.

When two such nations clash, there is only one winner. And make no mistake about it: this is a war between nations, not between armies. Ukrainians certainly see it that way. Not so sure about those Kievan Iranians though.

The other day I mentioned that, as Ukrainians and Russians die, Putin is cowering in an underground bunker 1,300 miles from the action.

There was another war leader who chose such secure headquarters, but he had a ready excuse: his capital was being carpet-bombed. By contrast, Moscow doesn’t seem to be in any immediate danger of a similar treatment. So why hide away in, or rather under, the Ural mountains?

We do know that Vlad takes excessive, sometimes comic, precautions to protect his precious person.

Thus, when he was still in the Kremlin during the Covid pandemic, every visitor had to submit his urine, faeces and blood for tests. If the results were satisfactory, he was allowed to talk to the great leader, but only across the length of a 30-foot table.

But Putin’s inordinate fear of contagion still doesn’t explain his current location. There are many secure bunkers under the Kremlin itself, and they are amply stocked with all sorts of supplies. So Covid doesn’t explain the 1,300 miles.

It’s tempting to diagnose paranoid delusions, but this temptation must be resisted for being simplistic. In treating villains like Putin, we must always proceed from two presumptions: one of evil; the other, of rationality.

The second one is less secure (we’ll never go wrong on the first), but it still must hold sway until convincingly refuted. In this case, let’s assume that Putin is hiding away for concrete reasons that to him seem valid.

This gets us back to the question in the title. What’s he afraid of? I can think of only two possibilities.

First, he justifiably regards the danger of assassination as real. One of his nearest and dearest may want to resolve the on-going disaster by slipping a little something into Vlad’s carrot juice or perhaps smearing a different something on his bed linen.

Just look at the haste with which some of Putin’s moneybags, such as Fridman and Deripaska (though not Abramovich), and even some members of his own family have tried to distance themselves from the war. They know that, however the war ends, they’ve already lost it.

Western sanctions against their little empires and them personally are jeopardising everything they’ve built, souring the fruits of their mafioso labour. Where are they going to sail their 300-foot yachts? The Volga? Lake Baikal? What use are their Western palaces if they can’t get to them? Who’s going to treat their illnesses and educate their children? Will their frozen assets ever be thawed?

Many such questions must be going through their minds, and they conceivably may decide that a little polonium in Vlad’s drink or a smear of Novichok on his napkin just may answer all of them at once.

There must also be quite a few military men of high rank who hate the way the war is going, the monstrous orders they have to issue to their troops, and the Hague War Crimes Tribunal shimmering through the air like a ghostly mirage. Such chaps may prefer a Makarov pistol as their weapon of choice, but the outcome would be the same, if faster in arriving.

Then of course some second-tier officials (Vlad himself is the one-man first tier) may feel now is the propitious moment to advance their own political ambitions. Post factum they’ll always be able to claim noble motives and pass themselves off as liberal pacifists.

Thus, Vlad’s fear of assassination would be both rational and valid. But there’s another, more cataclysmic, possibility.

Putin may be seriously considering a nuclear first strike against Western targets, possibly cities. It’s the old banging-the-door-on-the-way-out syndrome.

In that case, a retaliatory second strike would definitely take out Moscow, and no underground bunker would be safe enough. The Urals offer more reliable protection, and Vlad wouldn’t want that proverbial door to bounce back into his face.

One possibility I’m discounting is his fear of a popular uprising. I’m sure the images of Gaddafi being first buggered with a bayonet and then shot have flashed so vivid in Vlad’s mind that he has taken every possible precaution against such an eventuality.

The moment demonstrators graduate from chanting “Putin is a dickhead” (Putin khuylo, for the students of Russian among you) to physical action, the dickhead’s stormtroopers have the orders to fire at will, no doubt about that.

Meanwhile I’ve been watching videos of Vlad over the past few days, and a sinister, sadistic smile never seems to leave his Botoxed mug. He seems to be enjoying himself, as if the carnage crowned his life’s work as its apotheosis.

One day such images will adorn entries for EVIL in dictionaries and encyclopaedias. For the time being they serve as icons before which Western quislings are kneeling.

One day, I pray, they’ll join Putin in the dock as his accomplices. And they stand warned: so far God has been generous in answering my prayers.  

An ignorant moron, is the answer to that one. And what’s worse than an ignorant moron? An ignorant moron with an ideology.

And what’s worse than an ignorant moron with an ideology? Ronald Atkinson, Rowan’s giftless brother.

He wouldn’t be worth talking about if he weren’t so typical of a lamentably large group of Putin groupies. But here I must own up to a bad mistake on my part.

Normally I don’t argue with such people, outside my articles, that is. For a rhetorical contest is like any other game: it must be played by some rules.

Alas, ignorant, ideologised morons are always rhetorical anarchists. They don’t accept any rules; usually they aren’t even aware that such rules exist. Hence they’ll say anything – and if there’s nothing to say, they’ll start screaming and sputtering spittle.

Knowing all that, I shouldn’t have commented on Atkinson’s Facebook posting about how it’s all Nato’s fault. Yet comment I did, which elicited a response from him. My only excuse is that I did that silly thing at an emotional moment, when Putin’s hordes embarked on their rape attempt in the Ukraine. So here goes:

Me: “For your sake, I hope you’re getting paid by Putin. Otherwise one would have to consider such possibilities as mental retardation.”

He: “Nice to hear from a supporter of a Nazi friendly regime which closes television channels and arrests opposition leaders.”

Me: “Better than murdering them with radioactive elements or battle gases or bullets or garrottes or defenestration. And do try to look up the history of Russian independent TV or even independent websites. On second thoughts, don’t. One shouldn’t let facts interfere with the call of one’s heart.”

He: “The Zelensky Ukrainian government shut down three television channels and imprisoned the leader of the main opposition party. What democratic allies you have! Have you not joined the Azov battalion yet? Maybe not Nazi enough?”

Do you get the picture? One has to infer that Putin’s gang attacked the Ukraine to impose the sterling standards of Russian democracy, reopen the TV channels and liberate an opposition leader. And anybody who opposes that undertaking is a Nazi.

Atkinson didn’t provide the identity of that innocent victim of Ukrainian Judaeo-Nazi Banderites, but he had to mean Viktor Medvedchuk, a mafioso ‘oligarch’ and Putin’s best friend.

Medvedchuk, the leader of the pro-Putin For Life party, has been charged with treason, spying on Ukrainian military installations and violating trade sanctions against the Russian-occupied provinces of the Ukraine.

Rather than being imprisoned, he was placed under house arrest awaiting trial, but hey, Atkinson could just as easily have said that Medvedchuk was shot out of hand. No holds are ever barred for that lot.

Medvedchuk’s three TV channels were indeed sanctioned a year ago for undermining Ukrainian democracy. The US government beat Zelensky’s to it by seven years, when it put Medvedchuk under personal sanctions on that very charge.

Since then Putin (godfather to Medvedchuk’s daughter and widely celebrated as a staunch champion of democracy) has ordered his acolytes around the world to whip up a hysterical campaign demanding that this worthy individual be freed in the name of liberty.

Medvedchuk’s house arrest strikes me as an unforgivably mild measure. After all, he acted as a conduit for propaganda emanating from the Ukraine’s implacable enemy, Putin. The case for putting him in actual prison was much stronger than that for interning Britons of German descent and Nisei Americans during the Second World War.

Is that the best Messrs Atkinson, Hitchens, Farage, Zemmour et al. can do to prove that Zelensky (and, by ricochet, his supporters, including me) is a Nazi? Rather thin, wouldn’t you say?

Anyone who is neither paid by Putin nor blinded by ideological afflatus would know that Zelensky’s record, while not spotless, stacks up favourably against that of Atkinson’s idol. Hence every stone thrown at Zelensky shatters the glass house inhabited by Putin and Putinistas.

Murdered on Putin’s watch have been 156 journalists, and not just Russian ones. Hundreds of others have been beaten up, crippled, splashed with ghastly liquids, threatened or otherwise harassed.

There are more political prisoners currently held in Putin’s prisons than there were under Brezhnev, which is no mean achievement. Yet those are the lucky ones.

The unlucky ones have been murdered, and I hope their names will never be forgotten: Anna Politkovskaya, Galina Starovoitova, Boris Nemtsov, Natalia Estremirova, Sergei Magnitsky, Alexander Litvinenko, Paul Khlebnikov, Artyom Borovik, Yuri Shchekochikhin, Anastasia Baburova… (Google the full list if you’re interested; it’s available).

It’s not just hydrocarbons – murder is another commodity Putin happily exports to the West. At least 15 people Putin disliked have been murdered in Britain alone, some with nuclear or chemical weapons, some garrotted, some poisoned with extracts of rare Chinese plants, some killed in blown-up helicopters, most shot the old-fashioned way.

As for freedom of speech, whose deficit in the Ukraine so vexes Atkinson, every independent Russian TV channel, such as NTV, has been silenced. So have all independent newspapers, except, with certain reservations, one — and even that one is owned by Putin’s KGB colleague. All on-line opposition journals were blocked years ago.

Russian TV has become a generator of nauseating round-the-clock propaganda and nuclear threats to the West (the last such came yesterday from Dmitry Kisilev, whom the Russians affectionately call ‘Putin’s Goebbels’). And Alexei Navalny, the only opposition leader with wide popular support, was first poisoned with Novichok and then clapped into prison on a trumped-up charge.

Putin’s scorecard would be even more impressive had hundreds of opposition leaders not fled for their lives to the safety of Europe and America. But even had they all been martyred in Russia, Zelensky’s treatment of a Russian spy would still be invoked with enviable effrontery by Atkinson and his fellow Putinistas.

Rumour has it that his talented brother Rowan based his Mr Bean character on Rodney. I actually doubt that: Mr Bean is a lovable klutz. There’s nothing lovable about Atkinson et al. They do the dirty work of spreading enemy propaganda, which makes them today’s typological equivalents of Lord Haw-Haw.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that they should suffer the same fate. However, on second thoughts… No, perish such second thoughts – even if I am a crypto-Nazi.

P.S. Putin has sent out 400 professional bandits of the Wagner Group (owned by his stooge Prigozhin) with orders to kill Zelensky. This reminded me of the good old days of Waterloo. One of Wellington’s riflemen told him he had Napoleon in his sights. But the chivalrous Duke forbade him to fire. “It’s not the business of generals to shoot one another,” he said.

The two men in question are Volodymyr Zelensky and Vladimir Putin, hero and zero.

Volodymyr is leading his nation with the kind of courage that no modern Western politician has ever shown, nor, I’m convinced, can ever show. By contrast, his namesake Vladimir is cowering in his Urals bunker, 1,300 miles away from the action, just in case.

Just in case of what? A Nato missile hitting the Kremlin? Ukrainian special forces going on a mission to kill him, the way he sent out his Chechen bandits to murder Zelensky and everyone close to him?

If you insist that none of this is likely, you miss the point. Even if the probability of a serious risk to his precious person is measured in the thousandths of one per cent, that probability would be too high for Putin. Like most bullies, he is a coward.

If the two men are separated by a mere 1,300 miles geographically, morally they are light years apart. The moral swamp inhabited by Putin lacks novelty appeal – I’ve known everything there is to know about him since his name first appeared in the news. But I’m genuinely surprised to see Volodymyr Zelensky soar to such moral heights.

He wasn’t especially good as a peacetime leader. Then neither, for that matter, was Winston Churchill. But both men came into their heroic own when guns, not politicians, began to do all the talking.

Churchill’s heroism was mostly moral; Zelensky’s, also physical. What is it about this young Jewish man, who first became popular as a comedian, that drives him to the front line, rallying his nation to fight for its freedom, its very life?

When in 2004 Ukrainian people rose against Putin’s puppet government (a genuine popular revolution that Putin’s acolyte Hitchens describes as a ‘putsch’ in the hope of evoking Nazi associations), its head Yanukovych fled in a Russian plane, never to be heard of again – this though his life was in no immediate danger.

You can be sure that Putin will try to do the same when his time comes, as I pray it will soon. But Zelensky isn’t running even though Putin has sent out a Chechen assassination squad with the specific task of murdering the Ukrainian president.

That vile attempt has failed. Ukrainian forces ambushed the Chechen hit squad and blew its 56-tank column apart with the anti-tank weapons provided by Nato. Hundreds died, including the Chechen general in command.

As an aside, there I was, believing Messrs Farage, Hitchens, Zemmour et al. that, unlike our own impotent governments, Col. Putin is an implacable enemy of fundamentalist Islam. Yet his Chechen murderers were photographed praying with their imam before the mission, their bushy beards touching their camouflaged thighs. Now their 72 virgins await, and I hope they have enough of their bits left to do those lasses justice.

When Zelensky addressed his nation from the front line, saying, “This may be the last time you’ll see me alive”, he wasn’t pulling a PR trick. He leaves that activity for his Western colleagues to indulge in. Zelensky was ready to look death in the face, as if saying, “Death, where is thy sting?”

I don’t know about you, but that was the first time in my life that a politician’s words truly moved me. Suddenly I knew how Britons must have felt when listening to Churchill’s “blood, toil, tears and sweat” speech on 10 May, 1940.

Since I’ve promised Penelope not to swear in writing (she gave up long ago the effort of extending that injunction to everyday speech), I shan’t comment at length on the mantras being repeated by Putin’s British quislings.

Nor shall I try to get to the bottom of the tastelessness, intellectual paucity and moral decrepitude required to repeat at this time their pro-Putin apologetics, along the lines of “it’s all Nato’s fault.” Such an undertaking would take Shakespeare’s genius, not my modest ability.

One ‘argument’, however, is worth mentioning because it’s a ubiquitous component of their shamanistic chants. Instead of being tough on Russia, they say, we should concentrate on our real, more powerful, enemy – China.

The logic is staggering in its implications. They seem to be saying that, because Xi isn’t our friend, we should let Putin rape any European country he fancies.

One enemy at a time, chaps, if you please. And I hope it will be one at a time, for Xi may be sufficiently emboldened by the West’s limp-wristed sanctions on Putin to launch an attack on Taiwan. But, thank God, he hasn’t yet. So I suggest we follow the example set by Teddy Kennedy in 1969 and drive off that bridge when we get to it.

I don’t know how long the Ukraine can hold out. Nor do I know how close the Russian invaders have come to taking the 50,000 casualties Putin reportedly regards as acceptable.

If it’s true that the war is costing Russia £15 billion a day and her armament stocks are running out, perhaps there is a flicker of hope that the fascisoid aggressor will retreat, tail between his legs. Or maybe even a flicker of hope is too much.

Putin’s stormtroopers are clearly prepared to do to Kiev what they did to Grozny (see the photo), the capital of the same Chechnya that now sends its murder squads after Zelensky. Grozny was inhabited by Russian speakers, 80 per cent of them actually Russian. That didn’t stop Putin then, as it probably won’t stop him now.

But unlike Grozny, which was only founded in 1818, Kiev is an ancient city that has retained some lovely vestiges of its past beauty. What Putin is perpetrating now is therefore not just a war crime or a crime against humanity. It’s also a crime against the same Orthodox culture he professes to worship.

If you still harbour doubts about who’s on the right side in this war, just compare Zelensky’s handling of it with Putin’s. That done, I’m sure you’ll join me in shouting: Slava Ukraine! Geroiam slava!

The words came to me not in Ukrainian but in Russian, which is how I’ve transliterated the battle cry of Ukrainian patriotism: Glory to the Ukraine! Glory to the heroes!

And, may I add, glory to one particular hero: Volodymyr Zelensky.  

Seldom do I read articles on Russia where I agree with every word. Yet only distaste for plagiarism prevents me from claiming the authorship of the piece written by Garry Kasparov, former world champion and one of the best players ever to push wood around a chess board.

Here it is:

The Putin regime will find the cost of aggression unacceptable if the West takes the following steps:

1) Every country that condemns the aggression must recall its ambassadors. Isolation must be demonstrable.

2) Complete expulsion of Russia from all financial markets, including SWIFT and all credit institutions. The regime must be bankrupted.

3) Complete and unconditional ban on Russian propaganda media around the world.

4) All citizens of countries of the free world must be immediately required to quit, on pain of prosecution, any Putin concerns with which they are associated. Russia’s actions in the Ukraine must be classified as war crimes, and those who remain employed by Gazprom or Rosneft treated as accomplices to war criminals.

5) Complete expulsion of Putin’s officials from all international organisations, including Interpol.

6) Immediate impounding of all Russian assets scattered around the world, and we are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars. This money must be frozen. I even believe it could be confiscated – the West has enough laws against money laundering. These people, and their companies, supported Putin and created his war machine. Freezing as a minimum, confiscation ideally. Immediate expulsion of all Russians who have golden visas, starting with the families of those guilty of war crimes. Let them spend holidays in their own Sochi or Krasnodar.

7) Immediate and complete expulsion of Russia from the energy markets. That will cost the West quite a bit, but this is the price that has to be paid for all the years of placating Putin’s regime. It is essential that steps be taken to provide Europe with energy in case of an oil and gas embargo on Russia.

8) Only immediate and resolute measures can now stop the dictator running amok with a nuclear bomb. Any delay will mean that the same problems will have to be solved when Putin’s aggression spreads to Nato countries.    

Well put, I could have said all that myself. In fact, I have said it all myself, many times, over many years. The trouble is that no one listens to me – and I’m afraid no one will listen to Mr Kasparov, for all his name recognition.

It’s that second sentence in Point 8, the one about the West having to bear the cost of confronting Putin’s kleptofascist regime. Heaven forbid our standard of living will drop even one per cent as a result. And if it’s more than one per cent – well, Putin can have the whole of Eastern Europe, Nato or no Nato, see if we care. And even if Finland or Germany catches his fancy, we won’t raise a finger if that puts an extra quid on a pound of silverside.

My only question is about Point 4. Does it cover only Russian-owned media or also Western journalists disgorging pro-Putin propaganda in Western papers? Such as… well, you know.

P.S. According to newspaper reports, French presidential candidates Le Pen, Zemmour and Mélenchon have “climbed down from supporting Moscow”. They haven’t. All three quislings have expressed perfunctory regrets about Putin’s aggression against the Ukraine, while reiterating the Kremlin’s mendacious propaganda line about it all being Nato’s fault. That’s what I’d call praising with faint damning.