It was the EU that provoked the Ukrainian shambles, not Vladimir Putin

Quite one of the oddest and most frightening stories of the year has been the ludicrous and persistent misrepresentation in the West of the reason for the tragic shambles unfolding over Russia and Ukraine.

This has been presented as wholly the fault of the Russian “dictator” Vladimir Putin, compared by Hillary Clinton and the Prince of Wales to Hitler, for his “annexing” of Crimea and for fomenting the armed uprising in eastern Ukraine. Almost entirely blotted out has been the key part played in triggering this crisis by the remorseless urge of the EU to draw the cradle of Russian identity into its own empire.

It was entirely predictable that Russia and the ethnic Russians of eastern Ukraine would respond as they have done. So, too, was the wish of the vast majority of Crimeans, 82 per cent of them Russian speakers, to rejoin the country of which they were part for most of two centuries – let alone Russia’s reaction to the prospect of seeing their warm-water ports taken over by Nato.

The real significance of this unholy mess is that it marks the moment when the remorseless expansionism of the EU, founded to eradicate nationalism, finally ran into that implacable sense of national identity personified, for all his failings, by President Putin.

He and his people may now be paying a terrible price. But there was no way that poking the Russian bear like this, with such silly boasts as David Cameron’s declaration that he wished to see “Europe stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals”, would not arouse just such a reaction. As I wrote last March, the EU’s reckless bid to absorb Ukraine will eventually be seen as as much an act of fateful self-delusion as its equally reckless launch of the euro.

Just where these two crazy blunders may eventually lead we are only beginning to see – not least since Russia still supplies the EU with nearly a third of its gas.