impact. Through the early 2000s, wealthy Russian exiles in the UK waged a highly effective propaganda war against the new President, Vladimir Putin. A leading light was Boris Berezovsky, who used much of his money and his serpentine charm to wheedle his way into the corridors of power. He bought in the expert services of the Bell Pottinger PR agency, and underwrote the Chechen separatist cause, which gained a following from Vanessa Redgrave and other luminaries of the left-wing arts world.

He has been followed, rather more discreetly, by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, with his astutely named foundation, Open Russia. It is easy to blame the frosty relations between the UK and Russia over the best part of 20 years on Kremlin-ordered crimes on British soil. But the creation of sucha generally hostile climate owes much to the activities of these moneyed exiles.

The dangerous influence of expats By Michael Burleigh

There are good reasons – and bad – why individual exiles and diaspora groups come to wield influence in their new countries. They tend to be highly articulate; they have a cause and they can claim direct knowledge of countries and situations that governments and politicians know they lack. How accurate or up-to-date a grasp they have of the sentiment in their homeland, however, may be another matter, as the breakdown of the Ukraine vote shows.

It may also help to explain something else. Given that Ukraine had just held an election that was the model of probity and a vindication of the values the West claims to represent, the