PETER HITCHENS: Why British-made tanks rolling into Russian villages may be good for Putin

Something similar goes for the USA, with the Atlantic on one side and the Pacific on the other, and two feeble neighbours to north and south. Other countries don’t have it quite so easy. Russia, for example, has no natural defences of this kind.

I do get tired of tough-guy commentators from London and Washington, prosing on about the Russia-Ukraine war, with a mixture of ultra-masculine bravado and moral purity. Now the macho supermen are exulting about Ukraine’s invasion of Russia – in which British-made tanks are trundling through Russian villages. 

Don’t they grasp that this attack hands a gigantic long-term propaganda victory to the Moscow tyrant Putin? For years, he argued that eastward expansion of Nato would place a hostile alliance, armed by the Western powers, on Russia’s border, 500 miles from Moscow.

For years, Western statesmen and commentators sniggered patronisingly at the very idea that expanding Nato was risky. Nothing to worry about, they insisted. 

Now, as Putin said they would, British and American armoured vehicles are churning up the landscape on the road to Kursk, a city that has huge emotional and historical significance in the Russian mind, especially thanks to the cruel, incredibly bloody fighting in and around it in the 1940s, fighting that ensured Hitler’s final defeat.

In Russia, power has little to do with law or rules. The man who can show he can and will guard the nation becomes tsar. Power of this kind rests on raw force and total ruthlessness, and so Russia has almost always been an army with a country, rather than a country with an army. 

The Russian word for ‘safety’ is quite unlike its English equivalent. That word is ‘bezopasnost’. It is wholly negative. It means ‘without danger’. Because, in Russia, danger is the normal default position. Western statesmen and media, mostly knowing nothing of Russia, fail to grasp this.

So instead of having a workable if cynical relationship with this enormous country, we are always either at Russia’s throat or at its feet. In 1853, for example, we invaded Crimea. In the First World War we secretly offered Moscow ownership of Istanbul in return for help against the Kaiser.

In the Second World War, we gave the Kremlin Eastern Europe, in return for doing most of the actual fighting against Hitler. Now we feel tough again. 

But I promise you it will not last. God help and comfort all the poor people fighting, dying, disabled, disfigured, homeless, ruined and bereft in this moronic, needless war, so that a few silly people can fancy they are the heirs of Churchill. Oh, and a reminder to Al ‘Boris’ Johnson. I am still keen to debate this issue with you, at your earliest convenience.