Russian buildings in East Ukraine
Eastern Ukraine speaks Russia, and will become Russian again.
Can there have been any great international drama in which Western politicians have more completely stood reality on its head than the unending crisis over Ukraine, which is yet again creeping back into the headlines?

There was only ever one reason why the tragedy tearing Ukraine apart first erupted as it did in the winter of 2013/14: the hubristic itch of the EU, backed by the United States, to absorb Ukraine into its own ever-enlarging empire.

For this, the West was happy to see an elected pro-Russian Ukrainian president ousted in a coup d'état by an unelected stooge favourable to the EU. It was wholly predictable that the Russian-speakers of Crimea and eastern Ukraine would prefer to be ruled by their fellow Russians in Moscow, rather than by some weird form of government in faraway Brussels that they didn't begin to understand.

It was dangerously crazy of the West to react as it did, with John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, describing Crimea's vote to rejoin Russia as "an incredible act of aggression"; with Prince Charles comparing Putin to Hitler; and the EU's ludicrous little "foreign minister" at the time, Baroness Ashton, being cheered in Kiev by 200,000 Ukrainians shouting "Europe, Europe", many of whom had been paid by Brussels to do so.

So, after nearly three years of a civil war that has already left 9,000 dead, the leaders of the West remain as humiliatingly impotent as ever over how to respond to a shambles they did more than anyone else to create.

The only way this impasse will ever be resolved is by eastern Ukraine rejoining Russia. And President Vladimir Putin can wait, with his inscrutable smile, confident that, one way or another, that is what will one day come about.