Putin winning the war of words

Lithuanians, whose nation ceased to exist for almost half a century after it was swallowed by the Soviet Union after World War II, know only too well the possible consequences of Europeans allowing Putin a free hand in Ukraine.

The Australian Government has followed Europe and the West in imposing sanctions on Russia, but even these relatively mild measures drew a reaction from former Australian Ambassador to Russia and Ukraine, Cavan Hogue.

"What's in it for us? It's essentially a European problem," he said – an incredibly insular view of the world better suited to Neville Chamberlain in 1938 than a modern Australian diplomat.

In the United States, the Obama Administration seems to thrashing about in a policy vacuum not knowing what to do about anything – about Islamic State, about Syria or about Iraq. Everything coming out of Washington these days seems to bear the tag 'too little, too late'.

Meanwhile the Kremlin persists with the laughable fiction that it is has no forces operating in Ukraine. The casualties it is taking there – and they are mounting – are disguised as 'training accidents' within its borders, or simply not reported at all.

Local journalists who asked too many questions about two freshly-dug and un-named graves in the city of Pskov (where a crack paratrooper division is based) where met first with a wall of silence and then attacked in the cemetery by thugs.

The official line is that Moscow is sympathetic to the brave pro-Russian fighters outraged at the February coup that toppled their president and replaced it with a Nazi-style dictatorship which the West so mistakenly supports. It is a line taken up by some journalists and individuals who delight in singing from the Kremlin song book.

But as the Ukrainian forces, outgunned and outnumbered, are forced to yield more of their territory to the advancing Russians, we might well return to 1938 and Winston Churchill's comment on Chamberlain's 'peace in our time' speech after returning from Munich.

"You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war."