If this guy says I’m right, then I must be!

MANY in Britain laughed when a senior American diplomat, Victoria Nuland, was caught out by Russian spies a few years ago. They taped and leaked a conversation in which she said: ‘ **** the EU!’

As so many British people feel the same way, they read no further. They did not realise that Ms Nuland, a fierce neoconservative hawk, was mainly discussing (with the US ambassador to Kiev) the composition of the next Ukrainian government, as if it was for the USA to decide. Which, as it turned out, it was.

Her choice for prime minister duly got the job after the coup d’etat which removed the non-aligned, legitimate President Viktor Yanukovych. This fishy incident is the best evidence that Washington was up to its elbows in that violent mob putsch – the incident which began the Ukrainian war, way back in February 2014. Well, Ms Nuland is back in the US government as a very senior figure at the State Department. And she has an influential husband, Robert Kagan, who is if anything, even more of an anti-Russian hawk than she is. And here’s a treat for all those who have been calling me a ‘Putin apologist’ for the past month or so. Mr Kagan agrees with me that, while Putin’s invasion is unforgivable and wrong, the USA shares some responsibility for provoking it.

Writing in Foreign Affairs magazine, he said: ‘Although it is obscene to blame the US for Putin’s inhumane attack on Ukraine, to insist that the invasion was entirely unprovoked is misleading.’ He added: ‘Russian decisions have been a response to the expanding postCold War hegemony of the US and its allies in Europe. Putin alone is to blame for his actions but the invasion of Ukraine is taking place in a historical and geopolitical context in which the US has played and still plays the principal role.’

I think Mr Kagan uses longer words than he needs to here, because he probably doesn’t want what he says to be picked up widely by people like me. But he is far too intelligent to pretend that America’s relentless expansion of Nato since 1998 has not infuriated many Russians, even moderate ones. Of course it has. In my view, it more or less created Vladimir Putin. I honestly wouldn’t recommend calling Mr Kagan, let alone his wife Victoria, a Putin apologist. But in that case, you can’t call me one either.