Hack, mock and spam to help Ukraine defeat the poison dwarf

Whatever Putin plans for Ukraine, this is a beginning, not an end

So this is what happens when an unloved little old man is deprived of female company for too long. By 2014 even the trillions of rubles he had stolen from Russia were no longer enough to compensate for his poisonous nature and his wife left him. It's not surprising that his previous act of full-scale military belligerence happened that year, and it got him the attention he craved.

For nearly eight years after that his East German mummy figure more or less kept him in line, perhaps the greatest episode of statesmanship in our lifetimes. But Angela Merkel could not keep going for ever, and with her retirement comes Vladimir Putin's next infraction.

Rattling around in his kleptocrat man palace with only yes men and his own little floppy moobs for company, desperately jacking up steroids to try to turn those pudgy udders into pecs while hoping the latest work he's had done makes his head look slightly less like a turnip ... it's no way to live. No wonder he's lashed out. But what everyone's asking is: what does Vlabimoobs Putin want to achieve? Does he even know?

The good news, if British ministers are to be believed, is that the "liberation" of Ukraine is not going according to Putin's plan. Perhaps he didn't bank on a long-established country of 44 million being reluctant to surrender the democracy it had battled fiercely to obtain. His puffy-faced, boggle-eyed entreaty to Ukraine's military to stage a coup against its fairly elected and accountable government hinged on a startling category error: military coups happen in dictatorships like his, not in democracies. And his silly attempt to characterise the 44-year-old president Volodymyr Zelensky and his administration as drug addicts and neo-Nazis -- likewise, such slurs go unchallenged by the spavined state-controlled media in places like Russia, but Ukrainians know their president is no such thing, at least in part because he is Jewish. It seems unlikely that Ukraine's top brass did anything more than give a hollow laugh and carry on oiling their Israeli bullpen assault rifles.

However, Ukraine's military, a similar size to the UK's, is not going to defeat Russia's million-strong force, or even the 200,000 troops now in and around Ukraine. Some Russians still possessed of a shred of decency or humanity -- including a unit of the 74th Motorised Brigade -- are surrendering or deserting, and as more of their comrades twig that they are murdering innocents not on behalf of their country but on behalf of the hateful gnome that occupies the Kremlin, we can hope the numbers will grow. Russian casualties are reported to be far greater than Ukrainian losses so far. But it is unlikely to be enough, at least not in the coming fortnight of all-out war.

After that, though, the picture changes. As he starts to grasp that his soldiers are not going to saunter into a grateful Kyiv with joyful residents dropping flowers at their feet, the likelihood is that the evil goblin Putin will deploy heavy artillery. His TOS-1 thermobaric rockets have been seen coming into Ukraine. They spray an aerosol of explosive chemicals, which are then ignited in a secondary explosion that generates a shockwave of immense power. The casualties will be awful but he does not care. In his demented steroidal state he believes it will win him the gratitude of the Russian people and allow him to remain in autocracy until the end, challenged only by the grim reaper.

It is already clear that the Russian people are, on the whole, not grateful to their warmonger-in-chief. My first reaction on seeing Putin's security council meeting, like a hideous perversion of a scripted reality TV show, was to see the Russians as complicit in this disgusting farrago. We should kick all Russians out of Britain now, I thought. Yes, even my daughters' old piano teacher.

But that piano teacher's social media could not be more anti-war, and it struck me: we need to embrace the Russian people. This invasion is no more their fault than Boris Johnson's parties are the British people's fault. Just as Johnson was elected to do Brexit, Putin was elected to extricate Russia from the economic mire that followed the fall of the USSR. It is not really surprising that he retained the goodwill of Russians even as his less savoury traits started to become clear: the same is true of Johnson. And, again, just as we found out only this month how deeply Johnson's party of government is in hock to ne'erdowell donors, so Russians could not be expected to be aware of the 100 or so men (plus a couple of women) of revolting character who were contriving to steal their country, let alone to stop them.

My suggestion is that we extend the hand of friendship to the 133,999,790 Russians who are not on the US Treasury's list of oligarchs and appatchiks. Even the daughters of Roman Abramovich and the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov are actively fighting for Ukraine, by posting anti-war messages online.

We should join them. For years Russia has been waging war against the West online. Its victories have been huge: it probably won the White House for Trump, and it is responsible in large part for the partisan hostilities that have hobbled US politics. Now we must fight back. When Putin is willing, it seems, to raze Kyiv rather than let his imagined enemies keep their city and admit he was wrong, our greatest weapon is ridicule. Yes, we should keep sending weapons to help Ukrainians repel the invaders as best they can, but to end this conflict, we need Russians to despise the man who claims to lead them. To laugh him out of office. So cultivate your best insults, add a couple more savage adjectives and attack. Putin is not a hard man to take the piss out of. Mockery is the magic potion that can break the spell of fear in which he has bound Russians.

We can also attempt to jam up the Kremlin's IT infrastructure with a human version of DDoS attack: not bots and compromised computers but billions of people logging on to Russian state websites continually and continuously. Even if we're only a nuisance, it's something -- probably as effective as moving football games.

This is no joke. It barely needs saying that if Putin is allowed to take Ukraine, he won't stop there. And, much though China is tut-tutting in public, there's no doubt it is watching and learning.

To arms!