Meanwhile in the Black Sea, Putin’s fleet has been driven out of its prized base at Sevastopol eastwards to Novorossiysk, and even there it has been repeatedly struck by Ukraine. Russia has been pushed back, and the Bosporus, thanks to the prolonged war, remains closed to Russian warships.
Add all this together and the recent CIA assessment that Moscow could test Nato in Europe begins to look considerably less fanciful.
Russia, let’s not forget, has long been waging a hybrid war against the West. Britain has experienced cyber-attacks, espionage, sabotage and other malign activity in recent years. Much of this activity never makes the headlines because our excellent security services deal with it quietly and professionally. That is precisely what we should want.
The more worrying possibility is a conventional land grab designed to test Nato’s resolve and get Putin a new year-round harbour to even up the ledger for Tartus: the Russian harbours of St Petersburg and Ust-Luga, at the head of the Baltic, are subject to icing up. Putin has repeatedly demonstrated that he probes for weakness. If he concludes that the United States is retreating from its traditional role as guarantor of European security, he may calculate that a limited attack could succeed before Washington decides what to do about it.
The Baltics would be an obvious pressure point. A dramatic thrust along the Lithuania-Polish border to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad would be the most obvious scenario – and therefore, in my view, perhaps the least likely. Latvia or Estonia could present a more tempting target. Both have populations and territories that Putin still regards as his, through the distorted prism of Soviet history.