Ukraine is a test and Biden must find a constructive way forward with Putin

What is Mr Putin up to? Such is the feline Russian leader’s reputation for wily subterfuge that he invites endless speculation and conspiracy theories, yet sometimes the most obvious answer, based on long, weary experience of his revanchist tendencies, is the right one: he is trying it on.

In amassing the largest build-up of military forces on the borders of Ukraine since the invasion of Crimea in

2014. Vladimir Putin is doing what he always does – pushing his luck just as far as he can, to see what he can get away with. Everything the Russian president does, indeed, is calibrated with an almost preternatural ability to sense what the west will and will not put up with, and what, if any, retaliation will be directed his way. It is a game he is good at.

Today, it seems unlikely that the massing of armaments is a prelude to a full invasion of the parts of western Ukraine still under the control of the legitimate government in Kiev. More probably, the Kremlin wants to remind Joe Biden, ahead of the rumoured US-Russia summit, that Russia has resources and options of its own that it can use if the Americans are foolish enough, in Moscow’s perception, to try to humiliate Mr Putin or boss him around.

Western politicians, including Mr Biden when he was vice president, are well aware of the long list of grievances and grudges nurtured by Mr Putin over his more than two decades in power. He sincerely believes that, ever since the fall of the Soviet Union thirty years ago, his state has been deceived and betrayed by the west, and that the time has come for Russia to regain its self-respect, and, indeed some of what it regards as its rightful territorial inheritance.

A conventional war with Ukraine in the run-up to a proposed Biden-Putin meeting is not the plan; gaining some tacit concessions from the Americans about Russia’s role in her borderlands is a more likely objective. With the malleable Donald Trump gone, the more difficult Mr Biden will need to be assessed and prodded a little to see where he will yield. At least, when they meet, Mr Biden is unlikely to repeat what Mr Trump did at the Helsinki summit in 2018, and take the word of Mr Putin ahead of his own intelligence services, thereby disrespecting them publicly.

Russia being handed Ukraine on a plate is not on the agenda, and Mr Putin knows it, just as he knows it would actually be an impossible trick for him to pull off. The west of Ukraine and its capital are much more hostile to the Russians than the Crimea and the eastern provinces now occupied by Moscow’s proxies, and annexation and the installation of a puppet regime would be far more difficult to sustain, even by brutal oppression.

Mr Putin, though nostalgic for the Soviet Union and imperial times, knows that Russia cannot treat Ukraine as some little satellite in its “sphere of influence”; or as a purely internal matter, where the west will put up a token resistance before letting matters rest. Russian interference and aggression has been tolerated in various ways in Chechnya, Georgia, the Armenia-Azerbaijan dispute, Crimea, and eastern Ukraine.

Biden, while only making threats he intends to carry through, should also spend more time on treating Putin and the nation he represents with respect

A major recognisable act of aggression by one sovereign state against another would attract the full panoply of global condemnation and sanctions. It might end up more like Russia’s disastrous invasion and attempted control of Afghanistan after 1979, with the Americans lavishly funding Ukrainian guerillas, and Moscow risking an escalation into war with the west that Russia is not strong enough, at present, to win. For now, President Putin will be content with warning NATO off helping Ukraine too much, and making sure Ukraine doesn’t join NATO.

So a war “ain’t gonna happen”, as one of Boris Johnson’s predecessors in Number 10 once put it – or at least, no direct confrontation between the United States and Russia, and no attempt to reunify Ukraine and Russia. However, there is plenty of scope for the Russians to make more trouble, and to make life very much less secure and contented for all their neighbours and enemies.

The weapons are proxy wars – cyber attacks and espionage – but also Mr Putin’s tactical sense. Semiofficial, informal Russian elements were able to operate freely in the UK, poisoning former Russian agents and British citizens with chemical weapons. The unified reaction of the west to the Salisbury attacks was more militant than Mr Putin or his agents anticipated, but still manageable. So was the response to cyber attacks on America, including the CIA, and on Germany, South Korea, the UK and the Baltic states, the latter a particular bugbear of Mr Putin because of their treatment of their sizeable Russian minorities. Western elections will continue to be interfered with, if only by the army of bots and agents provocateurs set to stir up division in western societies through the manipulation of social media.

Right now, Alexei Navalny, the leader of what passes for the political opposition, is on hunger strike, suffering from coronavirus and slipped discs, and could well be in grave danger in his Russian prison cell, with remarkably little western outrage to be heard. What would happen if he conveniently died in custody? Mr Putin could be forgiven for thinking that the answer is “not very much”.

The most “successful” Russian dare, and the most shameful for the west, was the use of chemical weapons in collusion with the Assad regime in Syria. President Obama, having made it a “red line”, let it slide. It must be something which Mr Biden, then vice president, cannot look back on with much pride.

As long as Mr Putin is running things in Moscow, the Russians will never cease to test the west – because it has worked so well for them so far. The most that can be hoped for in the short term is that the Biden-Putin summit will succeed in putting down some metaphorical, as well as real, boundaries for Russia – but ones the west is serious about policing.

Mr Biden, though, while only making threats that he intends to carry through, should also spend more time on treating Mr Putin and the nation he represents with respect, acknowledging its status and concerns, and offering constructive ways forward where mutual interests should coincide, such as on the Iran nuclear deal and climate change. It is a truth too often neglected that there is no real ideological reason for Russia to be in a new Cold War with the west. Maybe the two presidents could agree on that.