Never let it be said I don't admit when I'm wrong. Having nominated Tim Garton-Ash for my wrong-headedness award, I'm going to flag up a superb piece of his in the Guardian on Ukraine - or, rather, on the attitude of some in the West to the current situation.

Here's the gist of it:

Why are so many west Europeans being such lemons about Ukraine's orange revolution? Every day brings a new example of some feeble, back-handed or downright hostile reaction.

Yesterday, it was Simon Jenkins in the Times describing the crowds in Kiev as a "mob". (Dictionary definition: "a riotous or disorderly crowd of people; rabble".) Last week, it was Jonathan Steele in these pages, responding to my enthusiastic column about the Kiev events with such arguments as this: "Nor is there much evidence to imagine that, were he [the opposition candidate, Viktor Yushchenko] the incumbent president facing a severe challenge, he would not have tried to falsify the poll." Unpick that contorted hypothetical if you can.

...For 25 years, I have heard these same old arguments against supporting the democratic oppositions in eastern Europe. Those oppositions, we are told, threaten European "stability". Behind or beside them are nasty nationalists and/or the CIA. We must respect the legitimate security interests of Moscow (an argument originally used to justify the continued existence of the Berlin Wall). A ghastly Pandora's box will be opened by ....... (fill this space with: Poland's Solidarnosc, Charter 77, the Leipzig demonstrators - sorry, mob - in 1989, anti-Milosevic students in Belgrade, Georgian rose revolutionaries, or now Ukrainians).

Behind all these contorted reservations, we hear an inner voice which says, in effect, "Why won't all these bloody, semi-barbarian, east Europeans leave us alone, to go on living happily ever after in our right, tight, little west European (or merely British) paradise?" And, quite often, "Why are those bloody Americans stirring them up to disturb us?" For this is not a simple left-right divide. It's a divide between, on the one side, central and east Europeans inside the EU, together with Americans of left and right, and, on the other, west Europeans of both left and right. Not all west Europeans, to be sure. In fact, the EU has spoken out remarkably clearly on the election fraud, through its Dutch presidency and Spanish foreign minister. But many west Europeans.

(To be fair to myself, his writings in the 1980s and just after the collapse of the Soviet Union on Eastern and Central Europe were always superb, and it's good to see that on this subject he's as clear as ever.)