There can no longer be any doubt – Putin is waging war on us

THE West has been pathetically complacent over the real nature of Putin’s regime since he took power at the start of this century.

Typical was Britain’s prime minister Tony Blair, who naively brushed aside warnings about Russian espionage to rapidly embrace Putin, even giving him a pair of silver Downing Street cufflinks as a birthday gift in 2001. Five years later Putin ordered the assassination in London of Alexander Litvinenko, a spy who had defected and detailed Kremlin killings.

Then came the 2008 invasion of Georgia, followed by his invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and illegal seizure of Crimea. I watched these events unfolding in Kyiv and Simferopol, then saw the corpses of innocent people and even pet dogs strewn around the fields of Donbas after his goons shot down a civilian aircraft flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.

Yet still-drowsy leaders of democracies in Washington, London, Paris and Berlin pretended Putin was a respectable leader – while greedy banks, estate agents, football clubs and lawyers helped launder the billions stolen by his patsy oligarchs.

Never mind the murder of Putin’s rivals, the crushing of democracy and human rights in Russia, atrocities inflicted by his armed forces in Syria, even the sinister use of a deadly nerve agent in Salisbury that killed an innocent British citizen.

It took the full-scale attack on Kyiv in February 2022 to finally wake most Western nations from their slumber.

Even then, the response has been hesitant and the support insufficient for the Ukrainian people on the bloodstained frontline in a war that has spiralled into an epochal global struggle between autocracy and democracy.

Now there can be no doubt: whether we like it or not, Russia is waging war on the West on many fronts – and we need to respond far more forcefully and smartly in defence of freedom.