IF there were no nuclear weapons, Europe would be at war. After all, didn’t the two world wars start over lands on the periphery? Despite all the economic and military power the West commands, there is little it can do to undo Crimea’s loss to the Russian orbit. Russia has used force and a questionable referendum to achieve its aim, but not before the West had done everything possible to provoke Vladimir Putin by wrecking Ukraine’s elected government headed by President Viktor Yanukovych. At loggerheads are two traditionally competing forces which throughout modern history have made Eastern Europe a battleground given the West’s relentless advance towards the East, and Moscow’s resolve to reclaim and reassert its position in the region. Busy with setting its house in order after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia felt frustrated when it found itself unable to check what it regarded as Nato’s intrusion into territory Moscow had, since the days of Peter the Great, regarded as its sphere of influence. What it was especially concerned about was Nato’s membership of some of its former Warsaw Pact allies.

Ukraine is Russia’s underbelly, and Moscow would hardly countenance a Kiev government that is on its wrong side. At the same time, Mr Putin is intelligent enough to realise he will not in the long run be able to reverse the former Soviet republic’s pro-EU orientation. For that reason, he has acted decisively in the wake of Mr Yanukovych’s ouster. It should also be considered that the West’s face-off against Russia is part of a wider global competition as a post-Soviet Russia reasserts itself. In addition to Ukraine, the two are poles apart on Syria. Interestingly, the West, which has shown little consideration for human rights and sovereignty in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine, is now angry at Mr Putin for the way the Russian president flaunted his military power. Perhaps a less perilous path would have been to involve the UN in order to let Crimea’s people decide their own fate.