Rosenberg: Putin's veiled threat to UK part of Russia's campaign against West

Increasingly Russia's president is mixing the geopolitical with the zoological. He recently spoke about killer whales "tearing polar bears apart" to justify Russia's war on Ukraine.The press conference in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, was a fascinating window on Putin's state of mind.For forty-five minutes he took questions from Russian journalists and came across as combative, confident of victory and energised. These days Putin appears most animated when talking about the geopolitical standoff between Russia and the West and the Ukraine" class="entity-link entity-event" data-entity-id="142386" data-entity-type="event">war in Ukraine. Even though the war has not gone to plan. Russia has suffered huge losses on the battlefield and the country's economy is under considerable pressure."I have no doubt that the enemy will crumble," he declared. Yet the war has lasted more than four-and-a-half years and Ukraine fights on.Officially the Kremlin still calls this a "special military operation". But even Putin now is using the word "war"."War is a brutal and unpredictable thing," he said at the press conference.He claimed that he remained open to negotiations to end the conflict and left no doubt with whom he'd prefer to sit down with from the US administration: Donald Trump's envoys.