We’ve all had annoying neighbors at one point or another in our lives.

But unless you live in a really (really) bad neighborhood, you probably don’t have to worry too much about the people next door launching an intercontinental ballistic missile at your house.

On Thursday, in an apparent effort to prove something about his willingness to deploy a nuclear weapon to win a war against a state he should’ve been able to conquer with minimal effort in the space of a few weeks, if not a few days, Vladimir Putin might’ve fired an ICBM at Dnipro. Kyiv said its military was 95% sure, but some analysts and a few unnamed US officials who spoke to the Western media suggested the projectile in question could’ve been something else.

There’s nothing funny about this, but there’s something undeniably farcical about it. If you’re a fan of my gallows humor, you get it: We’re coming up on the third anniversary of a war that many military analysts around the world suspected would be over in as little as week, and although Russia’s finally “winning,” they’ve now resorted to atomic saber-rattling and (maybe) to actual ICBM attacks to make their point.

Putin didn’t duct tape any nuclear warheads to the missile he launched at Ukraine’s fourth-largest city overnight, but the message from Moscow was clear enough, even if it turns out the offending projectile was “just” an intermediate-range ballistic: “Be careful: We’re workin’ with nukes over here!” (As if anyone forgot.)

Do note: Dnipro’s not even 1,400km from Moscow by the scenic route. And Putin’s maybe firing ICBMs at the city. Again, there’s an undeniable air of farce to this, even as the escalatory nature of the conflict — the participation of North Korean troops, the White House green light for Ukraine to fire ATACMS at targets inside Russia and now ICBM headlines — is admittedly unfunny.

Whether it was an ICBM or it wasn’t, it seems reasonable to suggest Moscow wanted to at least stoke those fears in at attempt to drive home the message from Putin’s revised nuclear doctrine. Earlier this week, he granted himself authority — and one more time, it’s hard not to chuckle at the cartoon villain nature of this macabre pasquinade — to open the silos in the event “any nonnuclear state with the participation or support of a nuclear state” demonstrates “aggression against the Russian Federation and/or its allies.”

About that. Russia only has a handful of allies, two of whom have their own nukes and one of whom (Iran) isn’t really relevant for the purposes of that nuclear doctrine. Russia’s not going to war for Khamenei. Iran’s not Syria and the IDF’s not al-Nusra. The logistics for Russia of propping up the theocracy if Israel tries to topple it are impossible. As for the Russian homeland, let’s be honest: Nobody wants it. And even if somebody did, it’s impregnable. Indelicately: If Adolph Hitler can’t conquer it, nobody can.

So, when Putin lowers Russia’s nuclear threshold, all he’s really doing is threatening armageddon if anyone tries to oust him or Alexander Lukashenko. That’s all this is, and it’s horrible: “If you try to remove me or my retarded cousin next door, I’ll just blow up the world.”

Putin’s bluffing, probably, but if he isn’t (i.e., if he actually deploys a tactical nuke in Ukraine), somebody will have to kill him. It’s just that simple. I don’t know who that somebody will be, but somebody. Maybe it’s an assassin working on behalf of Russia’s top military brass in conjunction with the oligarchy, maybe it’s the Russian mob, maybe it’s another rogue warlord, maybe it’s a suicide mission for someone in Ukraine’s intelligence service, maybe it’s China or maybe it’s Ethan Hunt, but he will have to be killed if he starts slinging nukes around.

I beg of readers: Spare me the “regime change” lamentations, and also the (manifestly ridiculous) notion that what I just said is a call to violence. Nobody wants what Putin’s pushing these days. Nobody wants a nuclear exchange. If he really is determined that one’s going to happen, what’s the rest of humanity supposed to do? Other than Salafi extremists fantasizing in caves, tunnels and tents, there are only two — maybe three — people in the entire world willing to risk a nuclear apocalypse: Kim, Putin and maybe Lukashenko, all three of whom would sooner kill us all than see their regimes fall. Don’t kid yourself: Russian politicians — Dmitry Medvedev, to use the most obvious example — have no real interest in the end times. They just pretend because they’re terrified of Putin.

I’d say none of that’s lost on the big man, but I fear it might be on some days. The pandemic seemed to drive Putin crazier than he was already going, and he’s increasingly prone to tortured historiography and seems swept up in his own revanchist narrative where he’s some kind of reincarnated tsar with a “destiny.” In short: He’s nuts now in a way that he wasn’t two decades ago.

Putin both is and isn’t the same guy whose “soul” George W. Bush thought he saw. The Putin we all knew and hated is still there, but there’s another Putin now and he’s even more dangerous than the original who, if you could separate the two into that Spider Man doppelganger meme, would point at his imperialist double and say, “I know dangerous, and that guy’s f–king dangerous!”

“Putin is terrified when normal life simply exists next to him. When people simply have dignity. When a country simply wants to be and has the right to be independent,” Volodymyr Zelensky said Thursday. “Today, our crazy neighbor once again showed what he really is,” Zelensky added.