There will be no hot war between Russia and the West over Ukraine and Crimea, although the consequences of the crisis could yet be grim for millions of people whose jobs, incomes and energy supplies rely upon stable relations between all concerned.

Within Ukraine, violence between different national and linguistic groups could escalate with potentially calamitous results. This makes recent rounds of tit-for-tat sanctions between the EU, US and Russia look all the more ludicrous.

There can be few more comic sights than Britain's Napoleonic foreign secretary William Hague in a state of high dudgeon. He pops up every few days to deliver a stentorian plea for harsher sanctions against President Putin and his entourage. As long as these don't infringe on the City of London's mission to keep its mitts on all that ill-gotten Moscow gold.

Hague's not ready to ride into Tennyson's valley of death with the bold six hundred, but today's commander of the Light Brigade must surely cut a swashbuckling figure in his bedroom mirror.

However, he has now been upstaged by EU Commission President Manuel Barroso and European Council President Herman Van Rompuy. Following Thursday's EU heads of government meeting, they sounded their bugles and cancelled the next EU-Russian summit, thereby putting the Russian fox to flight. Truly a case of the unelected in pursuit of the unedifying.

Not to be outdone, US President Obama is striking terror into the wallets of assorted Russian politicians and oligarchs, freezing any bank accounts they might have left lying around. Putin has retaliated by supplying Senator John McCain with the more of the oxygen of publicity that keeps him alive.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is also spoiling for a fight, so long as no real punches are thrown. She led the charge to exclude Russia from next week's G8 meeting, while being careful not to disrupt lucrative German business investments.

The whole shoddy merry-go-round fittingly portrays the sanctimonious hypocrisy of the West.

The EU huffs and puffs about relations between Russia and Crimea, while at the same time proceeding with the treaty which sparked the overthrow of Ukraine's democratically elected government in the first place.

The same political and military establishments that bombed and dismembered Yugoslavia pose in Ukraine as the defenders of territorial integrity and national sovereignty.

Britain, Germany, France and the US bestowed diplomatic recognition on the breakaway Republic of Kosovo upon its declaration of independence in February 2008.

Unlike the national and ethnic minorities in Crimea today, many of the Serbian province's 194,000 Serbs had by then been "ethnically cleansed" from Kosovo under the benign eye of Nato occupation forces.

Under Russia's "occupation" of Crimea there have so far been no pogroms between the majority Russian-speaking population and the Ukrainian-speaking and Tatar minorities.

Listening to Western bluster about democracy, human rights, sovereignty and indivisibility, it's impossible not to recall that these same powers also bombed and invaded Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya before handing them over to rival ethnic and sectarian forces, tortured and incarcerated prisoners from Bagram airforce base to Guantanamo Bay in sovereign Cuba, send drones to seek out and destroy people from Pakistan to Somalia and do nothing about Israel's brutal, illegal occupation of Palestinian land.

The West should stop the empty sabre rattling and accept that Crimea's people want to rejoin Russia. The relentless drive eastwards of Nato and the EU should cease forthwith.

All the big powers must sit down to discuss how they can assist the peoples of Ukraine and Crimea to live in peace with each other and their neighbours.