The West in general, and the EU in particular, chose to intervene directly in domestic Ukrainian politics, backing opponents of the thuggish but none the less freely-elected President Yanukovych. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that they were thereby inviting others to intervene. Ukraine was always going to matter more to Moscow than to Brussels, yet EU diplomats seemed genuinely nonplussed when, after they had sponsored undemocratic regime change in Kiev, Putin did the same in Crimea. To repeat, none of this is to exculpate the Russian leader. He runs a paranoid and autocratic regime, in which opponents are imprisoned, critics harassed, journalists murdered. [...]
Viktor Yanukovych rejected economic ties with Brussels, the EU backed his overthrow and signed the accord with the interim regime that had toppled him. All the assurances that European politicians had given about fresh elections, respect for the Russian language and so on were forgotten. The uneasy balance that had existed between (to borrow nineteenth-century Russian terminology ) Slavophiles and Westernisers, was upset, and many Eastern Ukrainians openly renounced their allegiance to Kiev, giving Putin the opening he needed. It’s easy to criticise with hindsight, you might say. But the Russian intervention was wholly predictable. It’s the ineptness on our side that's so shocking.
