DOMINIC LAWSON: Boris is right and Macron is wrong. Saving Putin's face is a mug's game
There are several things infuriating about this — quite apart from the moral squalor of speaking in such a way after what we have seen of the Russian army's depravity in Bucha.
Professor Snyder observed last week: 'Russian politics takes place within a closed information environment which Putin himself created and which Putin himself runs. He does not need our help in the real world to craft reassuring fiction for Russians. This can be seen with characteristic intensity in the words of one of the country's greatest writers from the 19th century: Fyodor Dostoevsky. The author of Crime And Punishment had spent years in a Siberian prison camp as a critic of the Tsarist system, and had enjoyed support and freedom in Europe. Even so, he wrote in his Diary Of A Writer: 'Everyone in Europe has long been secretly nursing malice against us.
Russia is the world's largest country, with unmatched natural resources and a cultural inheritance second to none. Yet its economy is no larger than Italy's, and smaller than the British: Russians look at our 'little archipelago' and puzzle how we can be so much better off than they are. It must somehow be the fault of 'sabotage by British and American intelligence', rather than that they did all this harm to themselves, without any assistance from outside.