Chaos in Ukraine: is any country safe?

What does the world look like without “red lines”? How do you feel now the words “this aggression will not stand” belong in the history book?

Chaos in Ukraine has brought the west faced to face with a nightmare it had almost forgotten could happen: powerlessness. After protesters overthrew the elected government in Kiev, Russian troops in Crimea moved out of their allocated bases and, with the backing of the region’s Russian speaking population, seized the whole peninsula. Now Crimea is on the verge of an independence referendum.

And the west did… well, not much. Having posed around on the smouldering barricades in Kiev, western politicians looked nonplussed as Russia violated the territorial sovereignty of a state that, since 1994, thought it had a legal guarantee against that happening.

A British national security adviser trooped into Downing Street inadvertently displaying the UK’s strategic response: no sanctions, no seizure of Russian assets, not even contingency planning for military action in Nato. How did that look in Warsaw and Bucharest?

Not great – and questions are being asked in east Europe about what the point of Nato actually is.

Meanwhile Russia Today, the Kremlin backed TV station, has seen not one but two of its female anchors express opposition to Putin’s Crimean gambit.

So the world is a different place. Is this a re-run of the 1930s, with the Russian-speaking city of Donetsk about to play the role of the Czech Sudetenland? Or is Putin just playing cat and mouse with a western policy elite whose unity was already shattered by financial crisis and whose populations are clearly sick of war?

We’ll be discussing all of this on What The Four on Friday at 7.30pm, live online. Join me and a panel of feisty guests, who will respond to your tweets. Use the hashtag #WT4

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