No one​ knows how this will end. Putin’s reckless adventurism has backfired: an attempt to mimic the US on a GDP of $1.5 trillion, smaller even than Italy and minuscule compared to China ($14.7 trillion), was always going to be foolhardy. If he imagined a quick sortie, akin to a colonial-style ‘police operation’, he must now realise that installing Yanukovych or another puppet president in Kyiv will commit Russia to maintaining a massive military presence in Ukraine. A country that twelve years ago had a polity roughly divided between pro-Russian and pro-Western factions has swung decisively in the West’s favour.

Biden, too, threw caution to the wind. His decision last November to proceed with Nato enlargement – starting the process of incorporating Ukraine – in the half-hope, half-belief that this would check Russia’s encroachment at the borders of Donbass and Crimea proved disastrously wrong. This can’t be admitted in public, but Nato leaders know it and so do the leaders of China, India, Vietnam, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Cuba and the other countries that abstained from […]