The west is attempting to goad Russia into a war it doesn’t want

It is difficult to understand why the US, in particular, would be talking up the war scenario now, writes Mary Dejevsky

Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden during a meeting of the two world leaders in Geneva last year (AP)

Another day, another spiral in the west’s wholly confected alarm about an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine. The latest escalation, attributed to unnamed US officials and brought to us by (among others) our supposedly cool-headed public service broadcasters, is that Russia now plans a major military advance, to include the capture and occupation of Ukraine’s capital, Kiev.

Against a background of reports claiming that 100,000 Russian troops are massed near the Ukrainian border, the US president, Joe Biden, has told reporters that he thinks Russia will “move in” on Ukraine, while not necessarily embarking on a “full-blown war”. Only 24 hours before, it was Ukraine’s defence minister, Oleksii Reznikov, telling the BBC Hardtalk interviewer, Stephen Sackur, that the west should be imposing swingeing financial sanctions on Russia before, rather than after, it invades.

In other news, as they say, the Pentagon has forecast that Russia could be planning a “false flag” operation as a prelude to invading (a la, no doubt, the notorious Tonkin incident that embroiled the US in Vietnam). Russia-led military manoeuvres in Belarus are being seen as affording potential cover for an advance into Ukraine. Meanwhile the UK has dispatched anti-tank weapons to Kiev, and the UK defence secretary, Ben Wallace, hitherto a voice of relative reason amid the tumult, seems to have spent hours of his precious time penning a point-by-point riposte to Vladimir Putin’s six-month-old essay on Russia’s kinship with Ukraine.