The Russians are on the warpath – and Europe is Vladimir Putin’s next target. That was Sir Keir Starmer’s alarming claim at the Munich Security Conference earlier this month. Britons ‘must be ready to fight, to do whatever it takes to protect our people, our values, and our way of life’, Starmer warned. Britain and Germany’s top military commanders delivered the same message in a recent article. Russia’s military posture ‘has shifted decisively westward’, wrote Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton and General Carsten Breuer. Soon the Kremlin ‘may be emboldened to extend its aggression beyond Ukraine’.

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Really? According to much western coverage in mainstream and social media, the Russian army is crumbling, corrupt and inept. The same Kremlin which is allegedly setting its sights on re-conquering the Baltics is also reportedly facing imminent insolvency, an inflation crisis and economic collapse. In some quarters Nato membership for Ukraine is heralded as the ultimate security guarantee against Russian aggression – yet it is also Nato which is, in the Starmer-Knighton narrative, the target of Putin’s next attack.

Are Russia and its army on the verge of collapse, or preparing for a Stalin-style assault on Nato? Both narratives cannot simultaneously be true. And as far as Putin’s army is concerned, overwhelming evidence suggests that it is rotten to the core.

An acquaintance of mine was recently killed fighting for the Russian army in Kharkiv province. I will call him Ivan. His pathetic story is a good place from which to explore the profound dysfunction of today’s Russian army. Trained as a lawyer, he suffered mental health problems, became very religious – but he also occasionally beat his wife, a journalist and close friend of mine. Ivan suffered a breakdown, impulsively kidnapped his small children and fled with them to the Russian provinces. His wife tracked them down, and he was arrested. The cops gave him a choice: join the army or face assault charges. Like other desperate men who make up the Russian army’s estimated 30,000 monthly recruits, he took the signing bonus – worth more than a year’s average wages – and duly enlisted.

Unsurprisingly, he hated it. After a year of service Ivan tried to get out and collected medical unfitness certificates from psychiatrists. But a group of comrades from his unit were offered a bounty to get him back. They travelled to Moscow, lured him out of his flat with an invitation to a drink, then kidnapped him. The Russian army, in other words, had offered a cash reward to serving soldiers to abduct a mentally ill comrade and forcibly return him to active service. Ivan had always managed to avoid frontline service. But his luck ran out late last month, when he was killed on his first assault south of........

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