But buying in an extremely tight market would cost an estimated €370bn, compared to €60bn in the last normal year before the pandemic. It would also require slashing demand by 10pc to 15pc.

Rationing on this scale is precisely what the EU is not yet prepared to face, although the experience of Japan after Fukushima shows that it can be done in extremis.

Energy-intensive industries are already in trouble. The Commission says half of the bloc’s aluminium and zinc smelters have temporarily closed or are operating at restricted volumes. The EU has shut in 30pc of its primary aluminium capacity.

“There is going to be a massive economic downturn but we are in a war situation and the only choice is to get out of Russian coal, gas, and oil completely. It is time the EU acted instead of reacting all the time,” said Mr Bros.

Western policy is a work in rapid progress. Perhaps EU leaders will rise to the occasion at a dinner on Thursday night in the Hall of Mirrors, the same room at Versailles where Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Wilson grappled with intractable ethnic problems left by the collapse of four empires – and were unjustly caricatured by a bumptious Maynard Keynes.

I reserve judgment. There has been too much self-congratulation by Brussels insiders over the “unity” of the EU’s response, as if unity rather than substance is what matters, and as if it were the EU rather than Nato that is helping to hold back 90 Russian battalion tactical groups.

Some seem more interested in using this “beneficial crisis” as a federalysing catalyst, a chance to force the pace towards EU fiscal and defence union, whether or not these architectural ambitions have any relevance to the slaughter before the world’s eyes.

The Chinese briefings after Xi Jinping’s video meeting this week with Germany’s Olaf Scholz and France’s Emmanuel Macron are revealing and unsettling. The state-controlled media said the talks showed that “Chinese and European leaders share similar stances and interests on the Ukraine situation.”

This is a remarkable claim. The evidence – rather than platitudes – is that the Chinese communist regime is supporting Vladimir Putin to the hilt.

What Beijing seems to be telling us is that the Franco-German couple signalled an unhealthy level of distance from both the US and the EU’s front-line states at a critical moment for the Western democratic alliance.

Let us be clear: European and Chinese interests in Ukraine are not remotely “similar”.