The charade has come to a point that – diplomatically – is quite unprecedented: Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov lost his Taoist patience.

A report in Covert Action Magazine from the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic in Eastern Ukraine describes grave fears of a new offensive by Ukrainian government forces, after increased shelling, a drone strike by a Turkish-built drone and an attack on Staromaryevka, a village inside the buffer zone established by the 2014-15 Minsk Accords.

As tensions rise in Ukraine, hawks in the West are promoting a more confrontational stance toward Moscow.

The US and NATO have been less than honest with Russia for so long, they’ve lost the ability to comprehend that there’s a new geopolitical reality underscored by the fact that, when Russia says a “red line” exists, it means it.

On October 18th, Russia announced it would formally suspend its mission with the NATO alliance, including ending official communication. This is a significant event but not totally shocking to anyone who has been paying attention to post-Soviet Russian relations with NATO. It’s important to look at what led up to Russia deciding it had enough and that it was no longer worth having an official relationship with the western military alliance as there is a lengthy historical context to the breakdown.

The various crises now springing up in Eastern Europe are meant as warnings against assumptions that Russia will simply accept whatever state of affairs the Western alliance decrees.

The United States and its NATO allies are busily arming Ukraine and engaging in other actions that encourage the leaders in Kiev to believe that they have strong Western backing in their confrontation with Russia and Russian-backed separatists.

Amid Russia-NATO turmoil, the foreign ministers of Russia, Norway and Finland will meet in Tromsø on October 26 to discuss regional cooperation in Europe’s northern territories. Ann Linde, however, is not coming as she is hosting a NATO seminar in Stockholm the same day. Jens Stoltenberg, son of Barents founder Thorvald Stoltenberg, is prominent in the NATO program in Sweden.

It’s 10 years since NATO hammered defenceless Libya and French jets drove the mercurial President Muammer Gadhafi into a drainage tunnel where members of a mob killed him.

Joe Biden’s administration seems determined to surpass its predecessors in taking actions that are certain to antagonize Russia. In just the past two weeks, the United States and its NATO allies have gone out of their way to provoke Moscow on four separate occasions. Such irresponsible behavior exacerbates already dangerous tensions with a nuclear-armed great power.