“Are you safe?”

I used to get that question a lot. It was either completely absurd or deadly serious and the truth was, I had no idea which. And still don’t. Not for sure, anyway.

After years of sobriety, though, I came to understand (or believe) that the answer was almost surely “yes.” Yes, I was completely safe. The question was entirely absurd.

The context was the Kremlin, and my standard response (“Just like us,” a reference that’ll be lost on everyone save the Clinton Hill-Bed Stuy natives among you) conveyed a sort of fatalistic bravado, but also a fundamental reality: Everyone bleeds just the same. Safe or not, suffice to say I was never concerned.

But if there was any truth to the stories I was pitched about my own prospective peril, I probably should’ve been. Concerned, I mean. Because while you don’t have to be afraid of Vladimir Putin, if there’s even a small chance he’s aware of your existence and not enamored with it, concerned is a healthy emotion.

With each passing week, I become more concerned about Putin, not in the context of my own history but rather in the context of world history and the extent to which he’s seemingly determined to write a terrifying version of it.

The US on Tuesday confirmed to America’s allies that Putin intends to put a nuclear weapon into space as early as this year, a prospect that’s unnerving not so much for what he might do with it — disable satellites — but for what it seems to say about his determination to flout any and all international norms. Even those related to nuclear weapons.

Russia’s a party to a five-decade-old agreement that bans orbiting nuclear warheads. I’d walk through the specifics of the treaty but there’s no point. You don’t need to read the agreement to understand the rationale. Like how you wouldn’t need to read the justification for banning tigers in nurseries. Or forbidding chimpanzees in air traffic control towers.

Putin on Tuesday lied about his intentions. “We have always been categorically against and are now against the deployment of nuclear weapons in space,” he said, speaking to TV cameras during a chat with Sergei Shoigu, bête noire of former Wagner chieftan (and current cadaver) Yevgeny Prigozhin.

I don’t know about anybody else, but I don’t believe him. I don’t believe a thing Putin says. Just a few weeks, I suggested that perhaps — just perhaps — it might be better to negotiate with him over captured territory in Ukraine, not because I don’t respect Ukrainian sovereignty, but rather because even in his delirious state, Putin surely understands now that his military is wholly incapable of successfully invading a NATO country. Yes, his army eventually pulled it together, but the first six months in Ukraine were a disaster. In the simplest possible terms: If he can’t capture Kyiv, he damn sure can’t capture Berlin.

Now, though, following Aleksei Navalny’s murder (and let’s not kid ourselves by pretending there’s some ambiguity about whether he was murdered or not) and the space nukes, I’m compelled to retract my suggestion. I don’t think it’s a good idea to negotiate with Putin. Ceding anything to the Kremlin at this point is a terrible idea. Putin’s irredentism in Ukraine is just part of a broader war against the West that began more than a decade ago, and he seems to believe the clock’s ticking — that if he doesn’t make his move now, he might not live to see it through, not because of any assassination or coup, but rather because he’s getting old.

I was alarmed on Tuesday to learn that Elon Musk’s “X” suspended Yulia Navalnaya’s account. X later said it was a mistake, claiming, somewhat plausibly, that the platform’s “defense mechanism against manipulation and spam” was triggered after Navalnaya created her account earlier this week. For obvious reasons, she racked up tens of thousands of followers within hours, and it’s not far-fetched to suggest that X’s algos might’ve made a mistake. “We unsuspended the account as soon as we became aware of the error, and will be updating the defense,” X went on.

Again, X’s excuse wasn’t implausible. But you can certainly understand why many people were alarmed given, for example, Musk’s history of controversial comments about Ukraine, reports that he refused to allow the Ukrainian military to use Starlink during a naval drone attack on the Russian Black Sea fleet and Ronan Farrow’s reporting which suggested Musk spoke personally to Putin outside of official US government channels.

To be clear: I’m not accusing X or Musk of anything. I’m merely explaining why I’m not alone in being a bit paranoid about the platform and the fact that Musk’s now privy to my only social media history, my direct message archive, my phone number and, presumably, my location. (And maybe yours too, if you’re on X.)

Navalnaya claimed on Telegram that X was preventing her tweets from showing up in searches. “If you enter my name in the search bar, my page is not recommended,” she said. I have no way to verify that, and I imagine X might go out of its way to publicize Navalnaya at least for a few days in order to tamp down criticism. But the mere suggestion that X was “shadow banning” Navalnaya is disconcerting (not to mention ironic given Musk’s pretensions to doing away with any and all checks on unfettered free speech). I won’t be sharing this article on X, that’s for sure.

Also on Tuesday, Ukrainian officials confirmed the identity of a man killed in Spain last week. He was Maksim Kuzminov, a Russian pilot who signed his own death warrant in August when he flew his helicopter into Ukraine and defected in exchange for half a million dollars. I doubt it was worth it, although it’s too late to ask him. As The Washington Post recounted, his “corpse [was] found riddled with bullets and run over by a vehicle… at the entrance to a residential complex in Villajoyosa.”

Ukrainian intelligence officials warned Kuzminov not to take the threat of assassination lightly but, to quote The New York Times‘s coverage of the same story, “he ignored them and… moved with his money to a small resort town of pastel houses on Spain’s Mediterranean coast.” (That’s Villajoyosa.)

“If the Russians feel so empowered within the European Union that they start killing people, the question becomes quite complex,” a Ukrainian official remarked, adding that “this is not the first instance where Russians behave this way.”

No, it’s not. Putin’s been assassinating defectors and critics abroad for decades with virtually the same impunity that he silences critics in Russia. And now he controls half of Ukraine and intends to put a nuclear warhead into orbit.

Writing last week for The New Yorker, Masha Gessen recounted conversations with Navalny. “He and I had argued, over the years, about the fundamental nature of Putin and his regime: He said that they were ‘crooks and thieves’; I said that they were murderers and terrorists,” Gessen recalled.

In 2020, when Navalny recovered after being poisoned by Putin, Gessen asked him again: Was he not yet convinced? No. He wasn’t. He persisted in the notion that the regime was “just greedy” and killed mostly to preserve their wealth and power. As Gessen put it, Navalny “thought too highly of them. They are, in fact, murderers.”

At some point, this has to stop. It’s been going on both in Russia and around the world for most of Putin’s reign. I still believe the answer is “yes” if the question is “Am I safe?” But if the question is, instead, “Is the West safe?” I think the answer might be “No.”