Behind his latest outbursts against NATO and doomsday warnings to the West, there are tentative signs that Russian President Vladimir Putin is keen to avoid an escalation of the Ukraine crisis and seek some form of accommodation with the West.
In the early hours of Tuesday, Putin warned for the second time in a week that European countries would automatically be drawn into a war with Russia in which "there will be no winners" if Ukraine joined NATO and then tried to recapture the Crimean peninsula that Russia seized from it in 2014.
