Here we go again. Russian artillery fires and a convoy – filled with aid, the Russians say – rolls across Ukraine’s border, where an awful but undeclared battle between Moscow’s proxies and the Kiev government for control of the country’s east has been under way for months. Kiev calls this “a direct invasion”. What will Washington and its European allies do?

Recent history suggests there will be many who argue against doing much. Why? Because President Vladimir Putin , Russia’s tough-guy leader, has been playing the west like a fiddle, giving just enough to pretend he is something other than the ultranationalist autocrat he has always been.

Mr Putin, the former KGB spy, is a master at giving his western apologists room to manoeuvre; at putting a case out there, no matter how implausible. This was true from the very start of his rule, when I was a correspondent in Moscow for The Washington Post and he was launching his crackdown on independent media and on tycoons such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky. His western apologists were happy to take Mr Putin at his word, that he was merely cleaning up the mess left by Boris Yeltsin, his predecessor, while failing to account for his efforts to dismantle the admittedly flawed democracy he inherited. “If by democracy, you mean the dissolution of the state, we don’t need it,” he once told western correspondents. Few paid attention at first.