Putin's Armchair Army
Putin has gained many admirers in the West. It might be time for them to rethink.
COMMENT
You would think Putin's apologists in the West might have gone quiet these past few days.
The Russian army is now shooting its way unprovoked into Kyiv, the capital of a democratic, if imperfectly-governed, country.
The Kremlin is threatening Finland and Sweden with military consequences if they join Nato, something they might be sorely tempted to do given Russia's current behavioural profile.
Putin has also put his nuclear weapons forces on special alert in case the West interferes with his plans to do to Ukraine in 2022 what his predecessors did to Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968.
The Soviet Union itself barely managed such energetic aggression even at the height of the Cold War.
And yet, barely days into Russia's attack on Ukraine, Putin's western apologists are once again wagging their fingers.
Their favourite talking point is that the expansion of Nato was the original post-Cold War sin of a triumphalist West.
Without that, the argument goes, Putin might have quietly stayed at home, minded his own business, and presumably been a bit more of a democrat.