Vladimir Putin, the murderer, proves the bad guys are winning. He’s invading Ukraine while the West plays guess-my-gender and freaks over a non-existent “climate crisis”.

The Russian President and his Chinese mate, dictator Xi Jinping, are winning because the West is weak and doesn’t even understand how evil leaders work.

Example. US president Joe Biden now says he’ll hit some Russian banks with even tougher sanctions – by golly – to punish Russia for gobbling up yet another bit of Ukraine and threatening to take the rest.

But the West plays Scrabble while Putin plays Grand Theft Auto, with real tanks.

Does anyone think Putin gives a spit about sanctions and sermons on international law? What’s the law to him? This criminal has reportedly had dozens of his critics murdered – opposition leaders, politicians, dissidents, businessmen and crusading journalists. His spies even poisoned three of them in Britain, including Alexander Litvinenko, who died from a nerve agent slipped into his cup of tea.

And what does Putin care about sanctions? The US and Europe slapped sanctions on Russia when Putin sent his army strolling into the Crimea in 2014 and stole it from Ukraine.

What good did that do? Putin is now back for a second slice of Ukraine, which he this week declared was actually a fake country that belonged heart and soul to Russia.

All of it – not just the two eastern areas held by pro-Russian militias and which Russia now recognises as independent.

Does that sound like a man worried about sanctions? What’s mere money to this man, now that he’s got himself a palace and a superyacht? Putin wants something much bigger – Russia to get back its empire, with him as the new Tsar.

He is looking at history, not trade figures.

This is a classic Western failure, to think leaders like Putin and Xi share our values. It was the same vain mistake with Hitler.

Western leaders didn’t understand until too late that he really did want to rule the world.

Besides, the West has given Putin years to prepare for this moment – plenty of time to do what we disastrously didn’t. He made his country much more selfsufficient, so the West couldn’t really hurt him with sanctions.

He got Russia to grow more of its food, so it could no longer be starved out. He built alternative financial structures. Most importantly, he formed a tight partnership with China, a new axis of evil, that includes a massive deal this month to sell China even more gas.

That makes Biden’s big announcement on Tuesday – that the US and Germany will stop the Nord Stream gas pipeline from Russia to Germany – not quite the knockout he’s selling.

In fact, Putin and Xi haven’t just made their own economies more selfsufficient in a crisis but the West more dependent on them for exports of critical things like titanium sponge, crucial in making aircraft.

The worst example? Europe went so mad with global warming hysteria that it banned many coal-fired power plants and fracking projects and now desperately needs Russia for 40 per cent of its gas. Now gas and oil prices are soaring in this crisis, which will hurt the West. Us too. And remember: China is watching to see if the world will stop Russia taking over Ukraine.

If it sees no real resistance, it will know the West won’t save Taiwan, either, when China invades.

This is what’s at stake, while we’re clowning around with our victim politics and our insane crusade to make ourselves weaker by banning coal.

When will we grow up? And when will the West realise Putin and Xi speak a different language – a language of violence? We’ve grown so complacent that we think war is unthinkable.

The West just can’t get its head around having a real war to deal with, but Putin and Xi have no trouble threatening exactly that.

Putin sends tanks into Ukraine but Europe won’t send a single solder to defend it. Voters wouldn’t wear it.

Germany sent Ukraine 5000 helmets instead – so Ukrainian soldiers can now safely headbutt the Russians.

There’s even less fight in the United Nations Security Council, which went into an emergency session as Putin ordered his invasion.

In fact, asking the Security Council to save Ukraine is another sick joke, when the council’s president is Russian and one of the members with a veto vote is Russia’s ally China.

I repeat: the bad guys now rule.