…if Russia’s President Vladimir Putin isn’t allowed to have his way with Ukraine.

Russia’s top diplomat said the West was engaged in a proxy war with his country that could escalate into a world war with nuclear weapons, as Western nations elevated their commitment to defending Ukraine.
“The risk is serious, real. It should not be underestimated,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in a Russian state-television interview broadcast Monday night. “Under no circumstances should a third world war be allowed to happen,” he said, adding that “there can be no winners in a nuclear war.”

Then Putin shouldn’t start one. The only one talking about a nuclear war over Ukraine or flowing out of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine are Putin and his cronies.

Lavrov went on:

Mr Lavrov said the West was increasing the risk of a bigger conflict by providing arms to Ukraine: “NATO is, in essence, going to war with Russia through a proxy and arming that proxy.”

This is a cynical and wholly dishonest extension of Putin’s fiction that Ukraine is an integral part of Mother Russia, and all he’s trying to do is to bring the wayward child back home.

This is why nothing anyone in the Russian government says can be trusted, from Putin on down through his Duma, and the only negotiation possible is for Russian forces to leave Ukraine altogether.

And how far back from the Ukraine border Russian roads and railroads must be torn up and the terrain (re)sown with farm crops or trees, along with the promptness of the return of the men, women, and children kidnapped forcibly relocated from Ukrainian cities into Russia.