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A 31-year-old Russian man, Dmitry S, was sitting on a pavement bench in the Siberian city of Omsk last month, drinking a bottle of beer. A car pulled up and a group of men in civilian clothes piled out. They twisted his arms behind his back and bundled him into the car. They said they were arresting him for drinking in public. They took him to an army recruitment centre, where he was forced to join up.

That story was told by the man’s family to the Omsk Civil Association, a local group that documents such cases. There are many others like it. In Ulyanovsk, a city on the banks of the Volga river, a 52-year-old man was reportedly arrested at the entrance to his apartment building for being drunk. His family told activists he was forced to sign a military contract and ended up in the occupied Ukrainian city of Mariupol. Another man in Ulyanovsk was allegedly forced to sign despite having lost an eye.

Rolling home tipsy is a risky thing to do for Russian men as Vladimir Putin struggles to find human sacrifices for his “meat grinder” in Ukraine. His vast army may one day achieve something that looks like victory there: sheer weight of numbers is on Russia’s side. But be sceptical of the claims that Putin wants to invade Europe, or is about to.

“Learn Russian,” said the Nato secretary general Mark Rutte last year. Or at least be prepared to start learning Russian if Europe does not rearm. The French President, Emmanuel Macron, asked: “So how believable is it, then, that today’s Russia will stop at Ukraine?” Last week, the warnings grew shriller still. American intelligence officials briefed the US media that Russia could “assault” a Nato country “in the next few years”. That could include a small-scale land incursion, they said, or a cyber attack.

Russia is already carrying out a campaign of hacking and ransomware attacks, and is spreading lies across the internet that you and I read. It is also – according to MI5 – busy recruiting criminals to carry out acts of sabotage. This is, as I have written here before, an undeclared war and Russia, a mafia state led by a gangster, is very good at it. But a “grey zone” war is not an invasion.

As a good contact in the Baltics told me: “They are bogged down in Ukraine.” This man is a senior officer in his country’s armed forces and spends a lot of time thinking about Russian intentions. After all, the Baltics were occupied by Russia before, in Soviet days. In his view, though, Russia does not now pose an “existential threat”. He does not expect to see Russian soldiers “in our homes” again. And he thinks Russia has much more to lose than gain from provoking Nato, especially now.

Russia is still estimated to be losing more than a thousand men a day, according to Ukraine’s military – 42,800 in July, its worst month of the year. The believed totals are truly shocking. In May, the head of GCHQ, Anne Keast-Butler, said half a million Russian soldiers had been killed since the war began. “Putin is going backwards on the battlefield,” she said. A US think-tank, the Institute for the Study of War, says that since December, Putin has been losing men faster than he can recruit them.

Ukraine keeps coming up with new ways to kill Russians, with drone and robots. Some estimates put the casualty rate at eight Russian soldiers for every Ukrainian, largely because of the drones. The Ukrainians have even managed to recapture some of their territory here and there this year. Elsewhere the Russian advance has slowed – they were able to take just 15 sq miles of Ukraine last month – and each yard costs more men than at any time since the invasion.

It is still an advance. And Russia has some 1.3 million men under arms, aiming for a total strength of 1.5 million. It is a nation of 142 million fighting a country with a population of perhaps 35 million. This can have only one end – especially given Putin’s indifference to the bloodshed on both sides. We should encourage our Ukrainian friends to make the best deal they can.

A peace that leaves Putin holding the territory he seized will not necessarily encourage him to seize more somewhere else in Europe. Putin and his generals have had several nasty shocks in the war with Ukraine. The Motherland has proved vulnerable. In August 2024, Ukraine managed to seize parts of Kursk – the first time since the Second World War that Russian territory was occupied by a foreign army. They held it for seven months. Even today, Ukraine remains in control of a tiny sliver of Russia, just a couple of sq miles, but deeply symbolic.

And Ukrainian missiles are reaching further into Russia than ever before. Last month, there were strikes on an oil refinery in Omsk, 1,600 miles (2,500km) from Ukraine. President Volodymyr Zelensky declared: “Now, no Russian oil refinery is beyond the reach of Ukrainian weapons.” Somehow, with homegrown ingenuity and Western help, Ukraine has managed to wage a war of long-range bombing against Russia. And Russian air defences have shown themselves incapable even of intercepting missiles virtually lashed together in someone’s garage.

How would Russia do against Nato, an alliance backed by a population seven times as large, some 980 million? True, some Nato countries may have only a few days’ supply of ammunition and the US is short of bombs and missiles after the ill-considered war against Iran. But Nato would still have air superiority over Russia and, on the ground, Russia would be fighting with equipment taken from Soviet-era stockpiles. Its army is now led by inexperienced officers after a whole generation was killed in Ukraine.

Putin knows all this. His most likely course of action is more of the same – more hacking, more economic and political subversion, more sabotage. The value of this campaign is deniability. It works because it does not trigger Article 5 of the Nato pact, which says an attack on one member state is an attack on all. When the first Russian tank crosses a Nato border, the Russian leader will start something he cannot finish.

A justified scepticism that “the Russians are coming” is not an argument for complacency. Putin has put the Russian economy on a permanent war footing. The Russian military is slowly but steadily rebuilding its capability. Intent often follows capability. Putin is an opportunist. If he senses weakness, he will try to exploit it. As the Roman general said: “If you want peace, prepare for war.” Europe should rearm.

But this is a precaution. Russia cannot defend its largest refinery, in Omsk, against home-made missiles. It cannot fill the ranks of its infantry without grabbing drunks off the pavement. That is not an army about to march on Europe.

The HBO drama is like its leading man Steve Carell – a small but perfectly formed delight. Carell is best-known for (US) and films like The 40-Year-Old Virgin, He plays essentially the same character here, a bumbling but ultimately good-hearted schmuck.

In this show, he is a writer of pulp fiction invited to teach creative writing at a leafy New England college. The students and faculty are prissy and politically correct, and much of this is Carell’s familiar comedy of embarrassment. He keeps saying or doing the wrong thing. We keep wincing.

Episode one has a painfully funny ending to a blind first date that still makes me cringe when I think about it. Like , there’s a panoply of cleverly drawn supporting characters. The selfish, preening, pompous British lecturer married to Carell’s daughter is especially good.