We should also send a clear signal that Russia's increasing espionage efforts in EU and Nato countries are most unwelcome. A co-ordinated expulsion by Britain, France, Sweden, Poland, Norway and the Czech Republic of a dozen embassy-based representatives of the SVR (foreign intelligence), GRU (military espionage) and most of all the thuggish FSB (internal security), as well as assorted "students", "bankers", "businessmen" and "consultants", would send a powerful signal to the Kremlin: that Western security planners are now seriously concerned with Russian efforts to subvert and intimidate us. It is these people who are bribing and suborning politicians, officials and businessmen, particularly in our energy industry, in order to smooth the ground for Russia's use of its huge gas and oil reserves.

The danger of delay is great. The longer we let Russia enjoy its feeling of impunity, the greater the risk that the Kremlin tries another stunt somewhere else. A vulgar analogy would be to see the Georgian crisis as the equivalent of Hitler's march into Rhineland. The danger is that the Baltic states fill the ill-fated role of Czechoslovakia in 1938; it is all too easy to imagine the West, divided and distracted by economic trouble and wars elsewhere, once again forcing an allied government to accept a noxious political settlement with its mortal enemy. Russian propagandists are already demanding, for example, a Russian "territorial autonomy" - in effect a Kremlin canton - inside Estonia. When Iceland, another strategically vital Nato member, saw its banks collapse, Gordon Broewn sued them; Russia offered a $4billion loan. The longer we go down that path, the nastier the price we will pay when we try to leave it.

Having bolstered our weaker allies and secured our own citadels, we should try a counter-offensive. The best place to do that is Belarus, now at great risk of a Russian Anschluss. We should be doing everything possible to open channels of communication with the regime there, offering it a safe and dignified exit from power in return for a strategic switch towards the West. Our previous policy, of showering the fragmented and highly-penetrated opposition with money and attention, has got us next to nowhere.