For years the EU has been wooing Ukraine, with that "Association Agreement" as a step towards making it an eventual member. But by pushing its "soft power" right up to the Russian border, this strange organisation dedicated to eliminating national identity has finally run up against the rock of a national interest that will not give way. And to what a pitiful state this has reduced our own supposed "leaders" in the West, Booker says. They haven't a clue what to do. They blether about how Russia is "isolated", and of those pathetic little "targeted" sanctions. Chancellor Merkel talks wildly of how the G8, of which Russia is currently president, "no longer exists". President Hollande calls on Britain to act against all those Russian oligarchs who have put 27 billion into London, when the UK knows it has 46 billion invested in Russia.
The EU's leaders can scarcely afford to be too aggressive when it imports from Russia 30 percent of its natural gas. They prattle instead about having to replace it with imports from the US which, thanks to fracking, has now replaced Russia as the world's biggest gas producer. But the US is only now building facilities to export some of it, and its preferred customer will not be Europe but Japan, desperate to make up for closing its nuclear power stations.
Squawking around like chickens panicked by a fox, the EU's politicians suddenly say, too late, that, to end our dependence on Russia, we must get on with fracking for shale gas ourselves. So it is that the Ukrainians are trapped between a rock and a place that turns out to be too soft to help them.
On Friday, when their acting prime minister Arseny Yatsenyuk came to Brussels to sign a truncated Association Agreement, the EU was so embarrassed that the ceremony had to take place behind closed doors, away from the eyes of the media. The poor man was not even allowed a microphone, but had to shout out his wish still to see Ukraine as an EU member.
Later, it was left to the foreign minister of the most powerful state in Europe, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, to go to Donetsk to meet Yatsenyuk, fresh from his "triumph" in Brussels. Ramping up the rhetoric, Steinmeier accused Russia of trying to splinter Europe, then warning that the continent's entire future was at stake.
Quoted by AFP, after meeting Yatsenyuk, he said, "The referendum in Crimea... is a violation of international law and an attempt to splinter Europe," words thought to be a show of diplomatic solidarity aimed at bolstering Kiev as it faces new rounds of pressure from Russia.
That pressure includes "threats to throw Ukraine's wheezing economy into convulsion by raising its gas rates and demanding colossal payments for disputed debts it could ill afford".
The EU knows it is powerless to prevent Mr Putin in due course absorbing Ukraine's Russian-speaking industrial heartland, leaving the EU to look after what remains of that bankrupt country, like a dismembered corpse.
But there is no sign, concludes Booker, that those impotent nonentities who pose as our leaders have yet realised that their ambition to take over Ukraine must now rank alongside the euro as the two leading examples of how their collective act of make-believe is finally hitting the brick wall of reality.