That lone voice crying the truth in the wilderness of Europe, Melanie Phillips declares in The Spectator:

The message Putin wants to deliver is that no-one messes with Russia. Like a Mafia godfather, he wants respect for his country’s power – and will mow down anyone who fails to offer it. That’s also why Russia is busy murdering those of its own citizens who oppose its fascistic regime. (It is, after all, the only country so far to have carried out an act of nuclear terrorism in Britain by murdering Alexander Litvinenko with Polonium 210 and leaving a trail of radioactive poison across London – for which it has never been brought to account, flicking away our huffing and puffing Foreign Office like a mosquito on the nose of a bear).

It is behaving in this way because it has correctly perceived that America is paralysed and Europe is steadily destroying itself, and so there is an enormous vacuum in global power which it thinks it can fill. It has no less correctly concluded that the west will no longer defend itself or the values for which it once stood. See yesterday’s entirely predictable and futile hand-wringing over Georgia by the EU, full of sound and fury but signifying no action at all. Once upon a time, the west believed it should go to war to defend the sovereignty of nations. Now, it supports instead those who destroy that sovereignty – as it did when it recognised Kosovo as an independent state, thus demonstrating contempt for the sovereignty of Serbia. Who therefore can be surprised that Russia, which not only complained bitterly about Kosovo but had previously insisted on the virtue of its own suppression of the Chechens on the grounds that national sovereignty had to be upheld or else chaos would follow, is now cynically using that very same Kosovo precedent to justify its support for South Ossetia and Abkhazia breaking away from Georgia?

Despite the fact that Russia is threatened by Islamism, there are nevertheless notable similarities between the attempt to re-establish the Russian empire and the attempt to re-establish the Islamic Caliphate. In similar fashion, both employ not only violent force but cultural infiltration and sedition; both use sophisticated propaganda and covert influence; both invert truth and lies; both hijack the concept of victimhood. Thus Russia’s patently absurd claim of genocide in south Ossetia parallels the preposterous Islamist claims of genocide in Iraq, the West Bank and Gaza; thus both claim that their own aggression is merely self-defence against victimisation. Such similarities are scarcely surprising considering that Islamism borrowed so much from Communism (as it did also from fascism). Nor is it surprising that both Russians and Islamists make common cause against the west – their common enemy.

The whole article is a must-read.