The news from the Eastern front is, as ever, grimly predictable. Vladimir Putin, that grand master of the staged tableau, has responded to Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian soil not with panic, but with a theatrical shrug. The UK Ministry of Defence, in its latest intelligence briefing, warns that the Kremlin is merely calibrating its next act of escalation.
One must ask: are we watching a war or a performance? The drone incursions, while tactically impressive, are strategically dubious. They provoke the bear without mortally wounding it.
And the bear, as history teaches, retaliates disproportionately. From the Chechen campaigns to the Syrian intervention, Moscow’s response to perceived humiliation has always been to double down. We are seeing the prelude to a winter of heavier bombardments, more cynical mobilisations, and a deepening of the very stalemate that both sides claim to reject.
The West, meanwhile, tuts and sanctions, mistaking expressions of outrage for effective policy. This is the tragedy of our age: a conflict that mirrors the Thirty Years’ War in its ideological stubbornness, but without the prospect of a Westphalian peace. Putin knows that time is on his side, for the West’s attention span is short and its energy costs are long.
The drone strikes are a tease; the response will be a symphony of destruction. And we, the audience, will applaud our own virtue while the curtain rises on yet another act of devastation.
