A protester holds an image of Russian President Vladimir Putin, depicted as Adolf Hitler, in front of the White House in Washington, US, on Thursday. Picture: REUTERS

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AFTER 18 books, countless documentaries and articles, and discussions with ex-diplomats and network producers, I am still no closer to understanding who Vladimir Putin is, so I have stopped trying.

The material merely illustrates a profoundly complicated yet incalculable phantom who glides effortlessly between obsessive nationalism and assertive intolerance. From the bombings of Moscow to Alexander Litvinenko’s death in London, from the oligarchs to Hermitage Capital Management, from previous Ukrainian gas disputes to Georgia, Gazprom and Sochi, Putin has been unfailingly cast as the corrupt aggressor, the master breacher of rights who answers evidently only to his own questions, composed in his thesis at Saint Petersburg State University in 1988.

But my fascination has been nothing short of cathartic; between the lines, I began to admire Putin but I didn’t know why. I felt reformed but couldn’t find the evidence — until last week.

You could be forgiven for thinking God was actually Belgian given the sanctimonious responses issued to Russia from European bureaucrats in the wake of the Ukrainian revolt. Russia’s control of European gas markets, piped through Ukraine, is the source of deeply rooted animosity for these vacuous commissioners.

Via a carefully orchestrated disinformation campaign, the European Union (EU) has sought to delude Ukrainians into believing they exist in a dictatorship, despite the fact that their country has been a functioning democracy since 1994.

With help from the US, a series of suspicious fantasies has been composed: promises of cheaper or free energy, jobs, more security — all in the name of "contemporary democracy".

We in South Africa object to some of our terminally incompetent communist Cabinet ministers not only because of their incompetence but also because of their habit of espousing themselves as pedigree communists, when they are merely recipients of a bastard-moonshine equivalent: a little bit of hearsay Eric Hobsbawm, the occasional Ralph Miliband from time to time, and the big ones only once or twice a year (it’s damn uncomfortable to be stuck in a stadium without air conditioning or bottomless Fanta Pine, surrounded by screaming peasants). So why aren’t hypocritical contemporary "democrats" treated with the same contempt?

Because contemporary democrats, such as Tony Blair, the Clintons, the idiots in Brussels and the United Nations, have subtly, gradually, violated the application of theoretical democracy, severing it from anything that remotely resembles liberty.

Contemporary democracy is defined by the impoverishment of the middle class, the relentless enforcement of existing taxes and the manufacturing of new ones. It is characterised by the shameless presentation of unelected leadership accompanied by the bondages of climate change and white guilt — the strategically motivated capitulation of common sense to Hollywood-esque self-loathing. It is harvested from the electorate by its ambassadors, among whom sit the likes of Harriet Harman, Michael Mann, Diane Abbott, Catherine Ashton and Herman van der Rompuy.

It is in the interests of these patronising liberals and climate-change neo-Marxists to present Putin as an evil, war-mongering communist. Those who disagree are discarded as conspiracy theorists — and probably would have remained so, had the EU and the US not acted with such brazen indiscretion in the past week.

Putin inherited a country wrecked by his predecessor’s drunken ineptitude, where large volumes of its wealth were manipulated into fire sales and the most dangerous terrorists in the world roamed the streets. He envisioned the soiling of democracy at the hands of successive Europeans and Americans; he countered this by politically outmanoeuvring the West on Syria, and by gathering all the energy cards he could hold. The hysteria surrounding the Russian parliament’s decision to dispatch troops insults history; a vast percentage of Ukrainians are Russian — they speak Russian and have identical precepts of Russian culture.

But it appears some of them did not apply their minds, or believed the lies they were force-fed. Despite some cosmetic adjustment, they face a simple choice: keep the lights on or be used by the EU and the US to impose this fraudulent, dishonest, bankrupt ideology of bastard democracy.