Pushing their way to the front of the crowd at Vladimir Putin’s inaugural address in the Kremlin earlier this month were the usual suspects: the Orthodox patriarch Archbishop Kirill, defence minister Sergei Shoigu, ex-Stasi officer Matthias Warnig and Steven Seagal, the American action hero who starred in Above the Law. At the vanguard of this ghoulish fan club was the former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Since the end of his political career he has enjoyed senior roles in the Russian energy sector. Predictably, he was the first to grasp the hand of the man who feeds him.

The whole crew should be placed on a new sanctions blacklist targeting over-zealous and self-interested cheerleaders for the Putin regime that has annexed land in Europe, supplied