Boris Johnson may be finding support thin on the ground at home but in one place he was guaranteed a warm welcome yesterday: Ukraine. The Prime Minister travelled to Kyiv as part of a concerted Western effort to show support for the beleaguered country in the face of Russian aggression.

The prime ministers of the Netherlands and Poland were also in the Ukrainian capital to show their solidarity amid criticism of other EU countries, notably Germany, for seemingly refusing to take the threat seriously.

There have been calls for countries such as the US and the UK to tone down their predictions of imminent combat for fear of exacerbating tensions. A school of thought has developed to maintain that the deployment of 100,000 Russian troops, tanks and missiles to the Ukrainian border is a bluff by Vladimir Putin, who has never had any intention of invading.

It is still not clear whether he will or not. But if the Kremlin’s sabre-rattling had been ignored, the Russian leader would have seen that as evidence of the Western weakness he seeks to exploit. Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky is in no doubt that the very public support for his country has helped. It has certainly given Mr Putin pause for thought and encouraged the continuation of diplomatic efforts to give him a way to climb down.

The countries that have most at stake are not Britain and France but Poland and the Baltic states, which have good historic reasons to be deeply suspicious of Russian intentions. The Poles are sending defensive weaponry, including drones and anti-aircraft missiles, to Ukraine and are preparing for a potential big influx of Ukrainian refugees.

Kyiv needs financial help as much as it needs military hardware and the UK has advanced some £88 million to promote stable governance and energy independence from Russia. But it is the Kremlin’s hold over gas supplies to Europe that remains the biggest brake on the commitment of Germany and other countries like Italy, much of whose gas comes through Ukraine.

Russia has been warned that it faces a bloody fight if it invades and the full force of international sanctions will be brought to bear. But new laws targeting the assets of Russians in the UK are all well and good except that similar pledges were made in 2014 when Crimea was annexed but made little difference. To be effective such threats need to be credible.