With Russia massing its forces on Ukraine's northern and eastern borders and more incidents recorded, Russian President Vladimir Putin is blaming Kiev, playing the role of the victim, recalling other Kremlin provocations in recent history, according to a French newspaper.
Liberation begins its editorial with a famous quote by a Western diplomat who says, "I do not believe any published report on Moscow's intentions until the Kremlin vehemently denies it," noting from the newspaper that what Russia is saying is exactly the opposite of the truth.
Therefore, the newspaper believes that there is nothing reassuring about the situation in Ukraine, as the Kremlin strongly denied - this weekend - any responsibility for thousands of violations of the ceasefire on the border, including hundreds of armed incidents in the Donbass and dozens of Cyber attacks against government websites in Kiev.
Speaking for about two hours with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron, the Russian president blamed Ukraine for the rapid deterioration of the situation on its eastern border, adding that "the provocations of the Ukrainian security forces were behind the escalation."
But for many observers - according to Liberation - this role of victim cannot but remind us of other Moscow ploys in modern history, starting with the late Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's grumbling about alleged Finnish provocations, which he used as a pretext for sending the Red Army and its invasion on November 30 1939.
What its private reporters on both sides of the front line note on the ground is that nothing has changed in the Kremlin's tactics, including the quasi-freak arrangement of alleged Ukrainian attacks on dual-nationals.
While NATO says Russia has massed 190,000 troops in eastern Ukraine, Liberation says Belarus has deployed almost all of its army on Ukraine's northern border, backed by more than 30,000 additional Russian soldiers, making it possible A double attack was launched on the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, which is only about 100 km from the front.
Liberation concluded that any Russian attack that ignores the warnings of the West would amount to a European war with all the meaning of this frightening term, and therefore Macron is right to do everything in his power to avoid what may now seem inevitable, according to the newspaper.