Month: March 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On second thoughts…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Dear Vlad,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“As ever,

“Alex”

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

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.