Nato needs united front to halt Putin

NATO is a defensive military alliance, the security of its individual members resting on its very simple central tenet that if one country is attacked then all other members of the alliance – including the mighty United States – will come to its immediate military aid. As a purely defensive alliance, it is no threat to Russia at all, unless of course Russia is proposing to attack one of its members.

Therefore, unless Russia wants to invade Ukraine anyway it should not matter that Ukraine wants to join Nato.

The nub of the issue is that Russia does indeed want to annex Ukraine and knows it cannot do so if and when Ukraine joins Nato. But until that moment comes, it can plunge Ukraine into a bloody war.

To deter Vladimir Putin the West must present a united front and must mean it when it talks about sanctions, sanctions that will bite hard, sanctions that will be rigidly policed, sanctions that will be imposed despite any retaliatory action such as threats to the gas supplies of any individual nation.

Without that united front Putin will merely laugh at the protests of the leaders who have already visited him and sat at the other end of that absurdly long table. He was a member of the KGB and has never cast off its ruthless ways.

AFTER its brief experience of democracy under Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, he pulled Russia back to being an effective dictatorship. He has got away with that because his early presidencies brought huge economic progress, because Russians have never wholly learned to live without fear of their masters in the Kremlin and because the rest of the world, while eyeing him askance, has been prepared to engage in a healthy trade. Meanwhile MI5 and MI6 still operate as if the Cold War had never ended because his intelligence and infiltration tactics follow that pattern. Yet body bags and economic deprivation could just make the Russian people sit up and take notice. One can only have hope but not faith that it does not come to that.