The oldest trick in the magician’s handbook is misdirection. The audience watches one hand – the other does the switch. President Putin is a master of these sorcerer’s arts.

In the past weeks in particular, he has shrewdly refined from the Cold War Playbook: make things look real that are fabricated, but appeal to power-brokers or influential groups in the West by making things look as if they are changing, when they are actually remaining the same.

In that vein, the weekend’s “ceasefire” in eastern Ukraine – which term demands the heavy use of air quotes – will very likely be over by the time the Easter eggs, east and west, are eaten. The fundamental diet is aggressive war.

But that brief truce is core to the wider illusion that a “real” peace deal is doable. It is easily sold to a propagandised Russian public, amplified by the official  national Orthodox church as a sign that the atheist former KGB officer in the Kremlin has “got” religion.

Moscow does not care about contradiction: the “halting” of attacks in the east of Ukraine, came at the same time as a statement from the Kremlin that it is making progress in the war (a balance to keep its ultra-nationalists and generals happy).

The increased use of chemical weapons in the past months and horrific use........

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