Ukraine Crisis: The Cold War is back under Putin’s Russia and the Gorbachev era long gone – Bernard Ingham

And death will be the fate of thouands if he marches into Ukraine.

Not that that will bother him, perhaps not even when the body bags begin to flow home to Mother Russia.

So far, he has his people under the thumb.

It is also clear that after Ukraine will come Romania, Poland and the Baltic States with possibly Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia to follow.

He is preoccupied with re-establishing the empire that fell into Russian hands in 1945.

We would do well to realise that we are up against Stalin’s son and heir.

The Cold War is back and it won’t go away.

The West has got to smarten up its ideas and face reality.

An ageing Mikhail Gorbachev may still be with us but the sort of Soviet Union that he tried – and failed – to build has gone with the wind.

His glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reform of the Communist Party) are of but fond memory.

He lived to discover the system he headed cannot tolerate a more relaxed approach to life.

So much for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Dictators who set the proletariat free have had it.

In seeking a way to find a recipe for co-existence, we should not get too carried away with nostalgia for Mr Gorbachev.

He undoubtedly was instrumental in ending the Cold War in Paris in 1990 and was certainly a reformer.

He also loved a free-flowing argument and had a sense of humour.

Once at the Bolshoi, Margaret Thatcher introduced me to him as “the man who keeps the British press in order”. Quick as a flash through the interpreter he expostulated: “But I thought you 
said the British press was free and independent.”

Mrs Thatcher was lost for words. I said: “Altogether too free and independent for my liking.”

He chuckled his way back triumphantly to the ballet.

But, from my close observation of him as Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary, he innately saw the West as a threat, even though Mrs Thatcher assured him at their first meeting that “if you Russians want Communism, you can have it, secure within your own borders”.

That is why when Ronald Reagan offered to get rid of nuclear weapons in Reykjavik, he also demanded it should also abandon its Star Wars system of defence in space. He was not going to leave the Soviet Union naked at the negotiating table.

After 75 years, the Politburo still does not accept that Nato is a defensive organisation.

Hence its objection to Ukraine becoming a member and the membership of the alliance to the West of its borders.

In short, in Putin we are dealing with a diehard, KGB trained Russian Communist who, just like China, is in the business of de-stabilising the West with the aim of taking over the world.

He is an empire builder without question and brutal with it.

Nor does he confine his brutality to Russia where dissidents are flung into prison at best and those identified as enemies of the state are executed, if the assassins are competent, even in the UK.

What more do we need to know to realise that here is a dictator who, along with Xi Jinping in Beijing, aims to win the world for Communism?

It remains to be seen whether the two forms of Communism can live together and share the spoils.

Meanwhile, there is only one thing for the UK, the EU, the USA, the Commonwealth, the democracies of Asia and Australasia to do: stand firm, extol the virtues of freedom within the law, work together, look to their defences and have no truck with the ‘wet wokeri’ that afflicts all free people.

We must ensure that our democracy is not undermined from within by obsessives who seek to end the free thinking and expression which are our heritage.

We have to make clear that we covet no nation’s territory nor threaten their existence.

We have no greater wish than to live peaceably on this Earth, and trade freely and fairly with the world.

But most of all we have to make sure that dictators who march like Hitler into other nations know that they will for ever count the cost.

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