Garry Kasparov: Sooner or later, the dictator will violate NATO’s land border.
Putin cannot simply stop the war — and this once-obvious statement is now becoming a common understanding. Everything happening in Russia today — from the propaganda front to the industrial sector — points to preparations for a new stage of escalation. That is precisely why Europe is openly getting ready for war.
Putin’s war is not just an act of aggression against Ukraine. It is a war aimed at dismantling the entire world order established after World War II — an attempt to drag humanity back into the era of “spheres of influence,” not even to the twentieth, but to the nineteenth century.
Today, senior Kremlin officials and the regime’s courtiers increasingly call things by their real names. The very word “war” is re-entering common usage inside Russia. And that means the war cannot be stopped — it must continue to expand.
The Kremlin quite rationally assumes that, for now, the West is not ready to confront a large-scale threat. But the key phrase here is for now. Putin knows perfectly well that time is working against him. Therefore, if he has plans — and I have no doubt that he does — for a land provocation against NATO, he will act quickly. The dictator who has already violated NATO’s maritime and air borders will, sooner or later, violate its land border as well.
