Stock markets have slipped – due to fears of central bank tightening, and peak tech earnings – but they remain stretched by any historic measure.
Either investors are not paying attention to Ukraine, or they think that Mr Putin is engaged in a theatrical bluff to extract concessions, noisily deploying over 125,000 men at last count near the Ukrainian border, along with attack helicopters and the dispatch of Baltic amphibious assault ships to the Black Sea.
They may calculate that the Kremlin will settle for what Joe Biden terms a “minor incursion”, below the threshold of response from a divided Europe that is strongly disinclined to respond.
Such insouciance is to disregard the military force posture in the field and the Kremlin’s unusual, but fleeting, moment of strategic advantage. It is now or never for Mr Putin. The stars are unusually well-aligned for the overthrow of the post-Cold War settlement.
Mr Putin has been playing a cat and mouse game with Europe over gas stocks since July, first withholding top-up flows on the grounds that Gazprom needed to refill storage at home, then trickling out just enough supply to nourish wishful thinking.
This method of boiling-the-crab-alive has worked up to a point: stocks are today at 43pc capacity, roughly 12 percentage points below where they should be at this stage of January.
But the gas shortage falls short of a total coercive lockhold. Mild weather and deliveries of liquefied natural gas have to some degree rescued Europe from its own misjudgments.
The Kremlin enjoys the same partial advantage on the politico-military front. European Nato disarmed through the austerity years and is now near rock bottom, while Russia has been rearming for a decade.
The White House is perceived to be a pushover after waiving its objections to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline last July in a shabby deal with Germany, which undercut Ukraine’s vital interest in what may be viewed by historians as a latter day Munich.
China’s sabre-rattling over Taiwan leaves Mr Biden facing the risk of two continental crises at the same time.
Mr Putin does not have to worry about serious economic retaliation.
Germany has effectively vetoed use of the financial “nuclear option”, which would be to expel Russia from the Swift system of international payments.
Berlin’s argument is that such sanctions have asymmetric blowback. The US has little direct exposure and would suffer modest loss. German and European companies with large interests in Russia would take the brunt.
This leaves little on the table beyond surgical sanctions on Russian banks and other manageable frictions. “I don’t see anything on the economic front that would seriously frighten Putin,” said Ian Bond, a former ambassador and British security planner now at the Centre for European Reform.
If Mr Putin is to attack, he must act soon. He has a narrow window for a combined-arms invasion with tanks and towed-artillery before the infamous rasputitsa turns the ground into a bog.
The military imperative is to lunge deep into Ukraine and deliver a knock-out blow before the mid-March thaw. That is not easy: it took six weeks for Russian forces to clear the Chechen capital of Grozny in urban fighting. Kiev, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Zaporizhzia, and Odessa are all larger.
A team of ex-military officers and planners writing for the Atlantic Council say that Mr Putin has over the last week “set the conditions to execute a high intensity, multi-domain attack”.
This includes the deployment of air defence systems, electronic-warfare platforms, Iskander-K medium-range ballistic missiles, and combat sustainment units.
It has used forthcoming manoeuvres with Belarus as cover to bring forward Su-35 advanced fighters and S-400 surface to air missiles. Still missing is the clinching evidence that Russia has begun to call up reservists.
