What the commentators said

“Putin’s gamble has failed,” said Yulia Latynina in The New York Times. He had hoped to bounce the West into meeting his absurd demands for Nato to withdraw from eastern Europe. But by sending military hardware to Ukraine, and mobilising troops, the US “called his bluff”. Now, Putin has a choice. He could stage a “humiliating retreat”. Or he could invade, risking a bloody war with a “much improved” Ukrainian army, as well as crippling sanctions which could seriously hurt his domestic standing. Actually, said Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Daily Telegraph, Moscow is well placed to deal with Western sanctions. Its central bank is as good as any, and Russia has all but eliminated its dependency on food imports. What’s more, Putin could always retaliate by “cutting off a third of Europe’s entire gas supply” – a powerful incentive for the West to “pull its punches” when weighing up how far to go.

That hasn’t stopped Britain’s tough talk, said Edward Lucas in The Times, but the UK’s efforts to act as the lynchpin of the Western alliance risk being undermined by its addiction to “dirty money”, which Washington fears could hinder its ability to impose effective sanctions. It’s right to worry. Kremlin cronies have long taken advantage of London’s lax regulations to launder ill-gotten gains; some £100bn of dirty cash, much of it Russian, flows into the UK each year via “impenetrable webs” of trusts and companies. People have been sounding the alarm over this for years, said Ian Birrell in The i Paper: in 2018, the Foreign Affairs Select Committee warned that money flowing from Moscow to London helps fund Putin’s efforts to undermine British interests. Yet the loopholes still go unplugged. The Government’s pledges to help Ukraine are “meaningless when our nation plays a lead role in cleaning the cash of oligarchs who prop up Putin’s regime”. It’s time we shut down the London laundromat once and for all.

What next?

Johnson was hoping to hold talks with Putin, having postponed discussions on Monday in order to focus on the Partygate scandal. Defence Secretary Ben Wallace is due to travel to Moscow next week for talks with Russian counterpart Sergei Shoigu; and Putin will meet China’s Xi Jinping after Friday’s opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Beijing.

Kyiv is playing down the risk of an invasion, insisting the situation is “under control”. Its tourist board unveiled a slogan urging people to “keep calm and visit Ukraine”.