Moscow’s dilemma is how to show its Western aggressor that playing with fire means getting burned – without inciting a catastrophic Third World War.

If the United States and its NATO lackeys really wanted to avoid a direct war with Russia, then they know what to do: stop arming the reactionary Kiev regime and get down to serious diplomacy.

This insanely dangerous conflict could end right now.

This week saw a swarm of military drones attack the Russian capital. The Russian authorities claimed that all of the unmanned aerial vehicles were shot down or electronically disabled, but not without some of the aircraft inflicting damage on civilian apartment blocks.

Nearly four weeks ago, a double drone attack was launched on the Kremlin Senate building close to where President Vladimir Putin has a residence.

Moscow has never been attacked in such a symbolic way since the Great Patriotic War when the Soviet Union was fighting Nazi Germany at the very gates of the capital.

Elsewhere across the Russian Federation, Ukrainian drones have targeted major Russian oil and gas installations, as well as military air bases deep inside its territory. Latest reports say Russian children are being evacuated from the Belgorod and Bryansk westerly regions due to constant heavy shelling by Ukrainian forces. Those regions have also seen commando-style incursions by militants using American-supplied armored vehicles. The CIA media front Radio Free Europe is evidently delighted by the anticipated sapping of Russian morale.

Russia is incrementally being subjected to a tightening aggressive vice, which when viewed in perspective presents a shocking attempted assault on its existential interests. Moscow has warned that its national defense doctrine permits the use of nuclear weapons if its existential interests are threatened. The U.S. and its NATO partners are provocatively shaping the Ukraine conflict into Russia’s existential concerns. The aggression is being fully directed and intensified by Washington and its NATO accomplices, in particular Britain.

The nearly 15-month conflict in Ukraine seems to be spiraling uncontrollably toward a direct war between the United States and Russia, the world’s two biggest nuclear powers. Russia did not want this conflict. Its proposals for diplomacy and dialogue over geopolitical security concerns due to NATO expansion were dismissed out of hand by Washington and its European minions in the weeks before the Ukraine war erupted on February 24 last year.

We need to be clear: the onus is on Washington to halt the slide toward world catastrophe.

President Joe Biden’s administration is brazenly lying to the American public and treating the Russians like fools. Following the latest drone attacks on Moscow, the White House and State Department repeated the dissembling mantra that Washington does not “enable or encourage” Ukrainian strikes inside Russia.

Washington is affecting a seeming frustration with Ukraine over the latter’s “incorrigible” use of American weapons to hit targets deep inside pre-war Russian territory. (That is, beyond the Crimea Peninsula and the newly federated Russian territories of Donbass, Zaporozhye and Kherson.)

This has led some commentators to surmise that the Kiev regime “has gone rogue” on its American and NATO sponsors.

Writing for the Libertarian Institute this week, Ted Snider remarked: “Ukraine is now pursuing its own security interests in a way that is extraordinarily dangerous to U.S. security interests. And they seem to be disregarding U.S. restrictions in pursuing them… The United States seems to have lost control of Kiev, and Ukraine is now pursuing its own goals in a way that ignores American goals by increasing the danger that NATO could get drawn into a war with Russia.”

In the same article, Snider claimed that the stated American goals were two-fold: to defend Ukraine’s sovereignty and to avoid direct war with Russia.

The sad reality is that many Americans who are anti-war and critical of the Biden administration’s reckless policy in Ukraine do not seem to fully understand the depth of Washington’s nefarious involvement. The goals of the United States are neither to defend Ukraine nor avoid a direct war against Russia. The goal is to defeat Russia by whatever means, to foment regime change, and to subjugate Russia for Western capitalism as in the 1990s under Yeltsin. It’s all about hegemonic aggression and dominance, a policy that also is directed at China.

In other words, the root problem is not some misguided policy by the Biden administration in Ukraine. The problem is the fundamental and relentless condition of American global hegemonic ambitions. That in turn stems from the nature of American corporate capitalism and its latest iteration as corporate fascism (albeit with a pseudo-liberal image and lexicon).

Ukraine and the conflict therein are merely a temporary means to a bigger end for U.S. imperialism.

Admittedly, most figures in the American power structure no doubt prefer to avoid a direct war with Russia as a matter of pragmatism and self-preservation, not principle. They prefer low-intensity, hybrid warfare and lots of distant violence right down to the “last Ukrainian”. But the problem of fomenting aggression no matter how stealthy is that it inevitably runs the risk of spilling into all-out war, as the present dynamic demonstrates.

The Biden administration and the foreign policy establishment, the CIA and Deep State imperial planners cannot pretend to be agnostic about Ukrainian strikes on Russia. The U.S. and its NATO accomplices have every step of the way de facto enabled and encouraged the Kiev regime to escalate hostilities with Russia. That was its mission ever since the CIA-backed coup in Kiev in 2014.

Only a short time ago, it seems, it was controversial to send the NeoNazi military in Ukraine anything beyond helmets and infrared night scopes. Then the supplies went from there to “lethal weapons”, longer-range missiles, drones, battlefield tanks, depleted uranium artillery shells, and nuclear-capable F-16 fighter jets.

You can’t arm a Russophobic regime to the teeth and then later turn around and coyly maintain that you don’t support the regime’s military tactics of firing missiles and drones at civilian centers in Russia. It is as insulting as it is duplicitous.

This week following the drone attacks on Moscow, President Biden commented that Washington was now considering supplying the ATACMS long-range missile system to Ukraine. This weapon has a range of 300 kilometers, more than double that of the already U.S.-supplied HIMARS rockets.

Despite the cynical denials and duplicity, Washington is consciously escalating the aggression against Moscow with its policy of doubling down on weaponizing its cat’s paw regime in Kiev. The duplicitous Americans know full well that this corrupt and unscrupulous regime will ignore seemingly pious public calls for “not striking inside Russia”.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has warned the U.S. and NATO that they are “playing with fire”. Especially considering that the Kiev regime has not gone rogue; on the contrary, it is doing what it is armed to do.

Washington could extinguish the fuse by stopping the arms flowing to Ukraine and by engaging in meaningful diplomacy with Russia to address the long-term security concerns. Not just with Russia, but with China too. Why are the United States and its NATO lackeys so averse to diplomacy and geopolitical engagement? The depraved incessant Western craving for war and conflict, for designating enemies and constant demonizing of others is illuminating.

But Washington is not taking the sane option of peace and diplomacy because it is fixated on hegemonic power interests. That way only leads to war and playing with fire. Moscow’s dilemma is how to show its Western aggressor that playing with fire means getting burned – without inciting a catastrophic Third World War.