Cheesed off comrade?

I wonder whether Liz—don’t call me a surgical appliance—Truss realises just how ridiculous she looked lecturing that wily old war-horse Sergei Lavrov in Moscow this week. Moscow has more troops around Ukraine than the UK has in its entire army... The days of the Great Game are well and truly over, and it really is time that people like Johnson and Truss realized that. I wonder if many others, like me, could not get out of our minds the vision of Truss’s indignation at the Tory conference on the discovery of how much cheese the UK imports...

Russia needs to be treated with great care. Putin may be a barely disguised hoodlum not chary of sending murder squads to this country, but the Russians are a proud people with a distinguished history. Twenty million Russians died in world war II, and they sustained 300,000 casualties in the storming of Berlin alone. The national pride was badly dented on ‘losing’ the cold war, and I suspect that the West was too busy congratulating itself to have been aware of that.
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The way to deal with Russia is by quiet—even secret—diplomacy, like Kennedy did with Khrushchev after the Cuba missile crisis, not by making absurd threats that everyone knows are as empty as the drawer where Boris Johnson keeps his morals.