Doing business to the letter

It seems, for the moment anyway, that when it comes to World War Three kicking-off, money is thicker than blood.

Which is to say that there has been some defusing of the tensions in Ukraine overnight. Although he remains in control of the Crimea, his troops still preventing Ukraine’s army and navy garrisons from leaving their barracks, his fleet still blockading Sevastopol, President Putin has pulled his 150,000 troops and Afghan war-veteran tanks back from their ‘manoeuvres’ on the border. So the war now seems to be shifting more between the US and the European Union.

If it is part of a series of shrewd calculations on Putin’s part, it is succeeding brilliantly. With their talk of reprisals and sanctions and grave consequences and all the rest, it is now the Americans who are looking like a dressed-up student re-enactment society on a Cold-War weekend away. The response from the EU has been more nuanced. Not exactly a re-run of Munich, no-one had the brilliant idea of stepping off a plane with a blank piece of paper guaranteeing peace in our time, signed by the Fuhrer himself, but not far off it. It even looks like the disabled Olympics in Sochi will still go ahead, despite the lack of freshly disabled Ukrainian athletes.

Because, we do an increasing amount of business with the ‘new’ Russia. Was it, after all, not The Blessed Margaret Thatcher who first announced that we could? Having abandoned its nuclear power program in the wake of Fukushima, Germany is heavily dependant on Russian oil and gas to keep the wheels in motion. The UK – ‘perfidious Albion’, as the C18th Marquis de Ximenez described our tricky habit of saying one thing and doing another – our curious attitude to sex being a case in point – has the interests of the City of London very much at heart. Only Poland is demonstrating extreme nervousness. After all, they’re next. And they’ve been here several times before. Still, it could go some way to solving Britain’s immigrant problem.

British Foreign Secretary Hague has been bravely out over the weekend in Kiev, laying a wreath for the cameras to mourn the martyrdom of the demonstrators. Meanwhile back in Downing Street, an unfortunately ‘accidental’ exposure to the long lenses of the press by a Cameron aide of a Cabinet Office briefing document which basically advised the government to do nothing whatsoever to upset the Russian applecart has firmly nailed our pallid colours to the drooping mast. We need their money too badly.

So the possibility of seeing the household cavalry on the streets of Knightsbridge, barricading Russian oligarchs in their basement swimming pools, has receded faster than William Hague’s hairline. (It is surely a triumph of British democracy that, unlike the erstwhile Ukrainian president, he has not had to adopt a bouffant wig.) American bluster in the UN Security Council overnight seems to have done little to dent the supreme confidence of the Russian ambassador, brandishing his absurd letter purportedly from the Kremlin’s toy-boy Yanukovych requesting Soviet… I’m sorry, Russian military support against the appalling fascist coup by which he was so disgracefully ousted from his democratically elected, conservatively furnished office (in fact he skipped the country, presumably at the suggestion of his kind friend, Mr Putin, bearing wads of cash which the IMF is now being asked to replace) and which put thousands of helpless ethnic Russians in fear of their very lives.

Yes, you can always rely on a good letter to keep the wheezy locomotive of history chugging your way.