Angie and Don and Vlad

Merkel and Trump want just one thing from their friend Putin: that he shouldn’t make them feel embarrassed about that friendship. Yet Vlad doesn’t seem to care about their feelings.

He’ll do what he wants: murder opposition leaders, cull or maim recalcitrant journalists, poison his detractors with military-grade toxins at home and abroad, invade neighbours, suppress basic freedoms and so on. That puts Angie and Don in an awkward position, but that’s their problem, as far as Vlad is concerned.

This time around, German doctors are fighting to save the life of Alexei Navalny, opposition leader poisoned with novichok, the military-grade toxin of Salisbury fame.

This one event tells you everything you need to know about Russia’s kleptofascist regime (and its Western champions), provided that people are willing to listen. Could it be that Angie and Don will now unplug their ears?

First, the tendency to murder political opponents ought to place any regime out of bounds for civilised discourse. I shan’t bore you by citing yet again a long list of Putin’s victims: you’re welcome to surf my earlier articles on this subject.

But it isn’t just the murders – it’s also how they are covered up. When Navalny was first treated at Omsk, local doctors insisted there were no signs of poisoning. Navalny was simply suffering from hypoglycaemia.

Even rank amateurs knew that was a lie. Low blood sugar may make a person feel faint and listless. But it certainly doesn’t make the sufferer writhe in excruciating pain and scream at the top of his voice before passing out, as Navalny did.

That doctors were prepared to lie so blatantly shows that Putin’s FSB/KGB exercises complete control over them – and, by inference, over everyone else in the country.

Before Navalny was finally flown to Germany, those doctors kept him at Omsk long enough for, they hoped, every trace of the poison to wash out of his system. The Putin junta issued its first denial then: unless those German quacks identify the exact toxin, no talk of poisoning is justified.

Now that the toxin has indeed been identified, “beyond a shadow of doubt”, new excuses pop up, each more risible than the next. The most spectacular one came from Alexei Lugovoi, the murderer of Alexander Litvinenko and pioneer in the use of nuclear weapons on British territory.

It was German doctors, he explained, who poisoned Navalny with novichok, to throw a spanner in the works of Russo-German relations. It’s not that Lugovoi expects anyone to believe this drivel. What he is saying in effect is that yes, you know I’m lying, and I know you know. But I don’t care because there’s nothing you can do about it except shut up.

The less outlandish claim, one parroted by many in the West, is that there’s no proof that Putin personally ordered the hit.

What would constitute such proof in their opinion? A written order signed by Putin? That probably doesn’t exist: such orders are usually conveyed orally. And even if it did exist, the chances of it ever seeing the light of day are somewhat less than zero.

However, the absence of evidence isn’t the evidence of absence. Chaps, read my lips: there’s no way in hell that anyone other than Putin could have ordered a hit on such an internationally known figure.

It couldn’t have been a rogue criminal or your friendly local FSB man: such people would have no access to novichok and certainly no knowledge of how to handle it without poisoning themselves and everyone else around.

It absolutely had to be someone close to Putin, and nobody like that could have possibly issued such an order without his boss’s explicit instructions. Anyone who knows anything at all about Russian affairs will confirm this.

However, the same logic is at play here again. We know and Putin knows we know. But his implied response, just like Lugovoi’s, comes from the same gangster rule-book: So what are you going to do about it? Nothing? So shut up and play the game.

So far Angie and Don have been doing just that. Why, is a different matter, and one open to conjecture. We don’t know for sure: as the Russians say, someone else’s soul is always in the dark. Yet it’s possible to throw some light on it.

At the same time Putin served as head of the KGB Dresden station, Merkel was a full-time organiser of the Leipzig Young Communist League (Kommunistischer Jugendverband Deutschlands). In all communist countries, including Russia, the YCL was under party control only nominally.

It was in fact the KGB breeding ground (four KGB chiefs started their careers there), which means that at that time Angie and Vlad were more or less colleagues. They were also neighbours, what with Leipzig being only 70 miles down the road from Dresden.

I don’t know if they met at the time, but I’d be surprised if they hadn’t. In any case, Angie and Vlad show every sign of warm intimacy. They speak each other’s language and always use the familiar forms of second person singular (du in German, ty in Russian).

Under their stewardship, the two countries enjoy close economic ties, only slightly damaged by the EU sanctions imposed after the rape of the Ukraine. Specifically, Germany imports 92 per cent of her natural gas, and about a third of it comes from Russia. (Exact figures are unavailable because Germany stopped publishing them in 2016, citing privacy issues. Quite.)

Whatever the proportion, it’s bound to increase when the second pipeline, Nord Stream II is operational. The pipeline is almost complete, except for the last 75 miles running through Danish waters.

There’s a hold-up there due to the international indignation about various manifestations of Russia’s criminality. But Angie is fighting manfully to overcome all such resistance. Nord Stream II will go ahead, she said last week.

This week she has had to take issue with the novichok escapade, being careful, however, not to blame her friend Vlad personally. She hasn’t gone so far out on a limb as to demand a written order signed by Putin and to exonerate him in its absence. But she has come precious close.

Now Trump would rather sell Germany America’s shale gas. But otherwise he has been steadfast in refusing to condemn his friend Vlad for any kind of beastliness. Congress has forced Trump to impose some mild sanctions, but he has gone out of his way to delay their implementation. And he has so far refrained from uttering a single critical word about his friend Vlad, which testifies to Trump’s capacity for loyalty.

I shan’t speculate on the nature of that friendship, but it’s easy to see its manifestations. By the same token, I don’t know the exact nature of nuclear fission. But, on the evidence of Hiroshima, I’m satisfied it exists. So does the friendship between Don and Vlad, certainly on Don’s side (I don’t think a career KGB thug is capable of such sentiments).

Sometimes that one-sided friendship looks more like sycophancy, but that’s a matter of nuance. In essence, whatever his motives, Trump fights against any attempt to hold Putin personally accountable for his regime’s criminality.

So far neither Angie nor Don has betrayed their friend Vlad, even though numerous officials in their own parties have issued ringing denunciations of the Navalny poisoning. High officials in the British and Italian governments, the EU and Nato have done the same.

Yet, though Vlad doesn’t seem to be in any need of friends, he thinks he can still count on his friends in need. He may be in for a letdown.

After all, Angie needs to stay on good terms with the EU, which, along with a malleable France, includes countries like Poland and the Baltics that have fond memories of Russia and her KGB. And Trump will be asked pointed questions about his friend Vlad in the run-up to the November elections.

They may well throw their friend Vlad to the wolves if that’s the only way to save their political careers. We are friends, Vlad, I can hear them say, but this is just how life is.

I for one look forward to watching Angie’s and Don’s acrobatic contortions with some schadenfreude. Few things please me more than seeing politicians tie themselves in knots.