A grim, expensive, choice faces Europe and the United Kingdom . Take on Russia in Ukraine or wait for the fight to come into our homes. Prepping for Armageddon by stockpiling tins of rice pudding , water and wind-up radios will mean nothing if the fight is not taken to the enemy .

Ukraine has proved this. And the suffering being endured across the country as the Trump administration has sabotaged Kyiv’s weapons systems shows how far Vladimir Putin will go to achieve his ends – a nihilistic fetish for chaos among his rivals.

As Wes Streeting, the defence secretary, said this week : “Terms like hybrid warfare and grey zone threats do not accurately capture or convey to the general public what I prefer to describe as state-sponsored terrorism.

“So in the face of those threats, which are not hypothetical but real, and not somewhere else but increasingly here, we have to step up and take seriously our national resilience as well as our national defence.”

Vladimir Putin greets US special envoy Steve Witkoff in…