Hypocrisy in full bloom

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

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

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

And what is the West showing? Cowardice and hypocrisy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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