NATO's quick and decisive responses also need to deter

The geopolitical Groundhog Day is still stuck on repeat. Each undeterred and unanswered escalation leads to another, bolder and more frequent. Each explanation for inaction becomes weaker and more elaborate.

This week I was honoured to join Financial Times chief foreign affairs columnist Gideon Rachman for the latest episode of his podcast. We discussed the implications of the incursions in more depth, and I hope our Western allies will soon pay more attention to the uncomfortable truths I listed.

Our Coalition of the Willing is still neither ready nor able. Our "quick and decisive" reactions need to be quicker and more decisive. Ideally, they should be effective deterrents, so the attacks won't continue and we won't have to keep thinking of ways not to deal with them.

Friday's tweet about escalation drew a lot of attention and ended up being quoted by the BBC as a deep insight, which is strange, when you consider the utter simplicity of the observation I was making. It's like I tweeted that the sky is blue.

Many people responded by asking what exactly I suggest Western allies should be doing.

Well, I am sure there are many ways we could enforce a red line without triggering WWIII. Speaking at the recent YES conference in Kyiv I used the example of Taurus.

We could simply tell Putin that Ukraine will get Taurus and our blessing to destroy launch sites immediately after an incursion.

This deterrent would neither start WWIII, nor cost too much, nor take too much time to build.

If we haven't got the guts to push Russia out of Ukraine militarily right now, that's very sad and disappointing. But if we haven't even got the guts to help Ukraine destroy the launch sites of the weapons that rain down on their children nightly – I think that's a horrifying state of affairs, and a shameful stain on our pages of the history books.

Instead of asking if we risk starting WWIII, the question is – will we risk stopping it?