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Welcome to a special edition of Coffee House Shots. I'm Fraser Nelson. In his political column for the

magazine this week, James Forsyfe looks at Ukraine and how Vladimir Putin had deployed 120,000 trips to its border.

He pulled some of them back shortly after giving a state of a nation address, but it raises the question, what is he up to?

Is Britain ready for it? And what might come in the next escalation there? He joins me now, as does Owen Matthews,

who frequently writes about Russia for us. So, Owen, what's your take of this? Might this just

just be in Putin-flexing his muscles for domestic consumption so his people

back in Russia can admire how strong he has vis-à-vis the West? I think that's absolutely right,

Fraser. I think Putin is an exception to the Chekhov principle that the rifle on the wall needs to go

off. I think it's really the opposite. I think it's a different

way of looking at this is as an attention-seeking gesture aimed at Joe Biden. If you think

through the consequences of him actually attacking Ukraine, I think one thing that we know about Putin

over the last 20 years is that he may be aggressive, but he is not suicidal.

And I think it's been made very clear to him, certainly by the new Biden administration, by Europe, that a second run at Crimea, a new surprise attack on Ukraine is not going to go without extreme and

dramatic consequences for Russia economically and militarily. So I think a different way of looking at

the buildup is as a response to Joe Biden's frankly rude and very contemptuous comment that he's a killer,

what the response was to the Biden-Putin phone call last week was triumphalism on the part of

the Kremlin is they called us.

They asked us to a summit.

It was almost infantile, actually, how the delight with which the Kremlin

people, Dmitri Piscov, the spokesman, spoke in terms of we are wanted, we are respected by the

...