THIS is Europe’s most dangerous moment since the end of the Second World War. It just goes to show the truth of the old proverb about fleeing from a lion only to find oneself in the arms of a bear.

While everyone was looking apprehensively at the Middle East, catastrophe struck in Ukraine. And, as in our policy towards the civil war in Syria, the West is once again behaving with incredible folly. Barack Obama long ago proved himself the most useless ever-chattering dolly of a US president since that naive peanut farmer and born-yesterday dafty Jimmy Carter. Naturally Obama has the full backing of his two snivelling lickspittles David Cameron and Willaim Hague: all three politicians – I cannot call them statesmen – are insisting that the people of Ukraine be free to choose their government.

Well, gentlemen, I have news for you: they already have chosen. And they chose, by a comfortable majority, Yanukovych now illegally deposed and seeking succour from the Russians. We know very well, of course, that Yanukovych is an unsavoury, brutal character and a crook fleecing the nation’s wealth to live in conspicuous luxury, but the fact remains he is Ukraine’s democratically-elected leader. Why does Mr Obama imagine that the protesters who deposed Yanukovych are any better than the man they turfed out? They are an ill-assorted amalgamation of sectional interests with no legitimate claim to set up a government.

As for Yanukovych’s rival, Yulia Tymoshenko, she is a rabble-rouser and a crook whose main achievement so far has been to make her fortune fraudulently with underthe- counter natural gas deals with the Russian mafia.

So now Obama is rattling his sabre at Colonel Putin who, I’m sure, is terrified by Obama’s threat that he might not attend the G8 economic summit in Sochi.

Putin is an old KGB man, ruthless and hard as nails. The people who live in the east of Ukraine, and in the Crimea where Russia bases its huge navy, are aggrieved by the illegal unseating of Yanukovich for whom they voted in large numbers; and so, naturally, they have sought help from Putin – who is only too willing to intervene in order to protect his country’s own strategic interests.

As I write, the two sides in Ukraine – west and east – are squaring up to each other and civil war is the most likely outcome.

Ukraine is accustomed to civil and tribal wars, savagery and barbarism going back more than 1,000 years. During the last century, the people of that country suffered genocide even more severe than Hitler’s holocaust.

In 1932, the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin collectivised farming in the Ukraine, surrounded the people and starved them to death over the long winter. In the spring, he sent the bulldozers in and they ploughed over seven million corpses. Let me just repeat that figure: seven million.

It is against this background of unimaginable terror that we should see today’s events.

It is insane of the US, the EU and the British Government shamefully to be canting about “democracy” and playing political games.

Ukraine is not Afghanistan – a faraway place of which we know little – it is the heart of Europe.

And now western governments are throwing petrol on the flames. There has already been bloodshed in Kiev. There will be more. And just how much more? This flashpoint could be the spark that sets Europe aflame. Western leaders are about to commit to unspeakable folly. The people of Europe do not deserve this. Where are our statesmen?