Waiting for Putin: Russia’s phoney war is playing out as surreal theatre

Is the man in the Kremlin's pressure on Ukraine a masterstroke, or has it served only to rally the fractious west against him?

Waiting for Russia to invade Ukraine feels a bit like Waiting for Godot. In this edgy reworking of Samuel Beckett's masterpiece, Russia's leader, Vladimir Putin, is cast, appropriately, as the restless Vladimir while the US president, Joe Biden, is the bowler-hatted Estragon, frequently dozing off.

The play's central conceit is that the mysterious Godot, expected at any moment, never actually arrives. After Russia agreed last week to keep talking, Ukraine's citizens have reason to hope the crisis will turn out to be a comparably vacuous non-event - a peculiarly Putin-esque contribution to the theatre of the absurd.