So President Putin probably isn't gay after all. Not gay in the sense of blithe and happy. Not gay in the derogatory sense used by teenagers to denote something a bit pathetic. He might still be gay in the homosexual sense, but it now doesn't seem like a good idea to suggest it, as many did after the furore in the run up to the Sochi Olympics. Have a Google for "Putin gay" images, and you will see that the Photoshop-literate have given their sense of humour a good workout in recent weeks.
Disturbingly, those pictures of Putin with the horse didn't need any doctoring.
This can't have pleased President Putin terribly, and one can only too easily imagine the conversation. "So they think I am gay do they? Pass me the map comrade. Where did you say Crimea was?"
Let no-one doubt that, whatever Putin's proclivities, he is no Judy Garland-loving interior-decorating panty-waister. No. He is the kind of man to send in the tanks. And there's nothing we can do about it.
Many commentators on both Left and Right have made this point. After the West's failure to intervene in Syria, referred to by Jonathan Freedland as the "global shrug", no-one can seriously have thought that we might have used military force to stop Putin. And of course you can argue that's a good thing. Military conflict could lead so easily to nuclear war. But that means that Putin - and other leaders like him - can do what they want with impunity.
How has this happened? Western revulsion post-Iraq has killed the appetite for intervention. You can argue that loss of appetite is due to a focus on the way the invasion was sold to British and American electorates, narcissistic in its refusal to see that the possibility of self-determination for Iraqis post Saddam might just trump our domestic politics; but we are where we are. We intervened there. Lots of people got very angry about it. Politicians are nervous. When Syria came up, Ed Miliband led his troops into the No lobby, and that was that.
Deterrence does not mean taking military action when something happens you don't like. It doesn't even mean readiness to take military action. It means the other people not being entirely sure whether you'll take military action or not. President Putin on the other hand was absolutely sure we would do nothing. That is a foreign policy failure.
Although I'm absolutely sure Putin is Not a Nice Man, I have some sympathy with the Russians. Ukraine used to be part of their empire. It's still part of their sphere of influence. The country has strategic military significance for them. Many Russian speakers live there. The outgoing Ukranian President was one of their people and was, apparently, democratically elected. The West can't really expect Russia to stand by when he is bullied from office by demonstrators who, however numerous, aren't representative of the country as a whole.
We get a curious picture from the media. Reporters like to interview people who speak English and with whom they can identify. So we get vox pops with Ukrainian web designers and academics. Thus a curious analogue of our own fixation with metropolitan elites arises. The people outside of Kiev are marginalised, the demonstrators encouraged, and it's quite late on in the day we discover that, funnily enough, to the east of the capital there are lots of other people who take a different view. Who knew?
If I were an opponent of President Yanukovyich, surveying the catastrophic scenes in my country, I might well find myself wishing that I had waited for the next election for a chance to throw out the regime.
PS David Cameron yesterday described the proposed Crimean referendum on joining Russia as "unconstitutional". Hmmn. Would be unconstitutional in the same sense that hounding President Yanukovyich from office was unconstitutional?
