The Russia-Ukraine grain deal is the first and hopefully not the last bit of good news

One has to look for silver linings in all the black clouds of war and misery and violence and global warming and rocketing cost of living and the prospect of Liz Truss becoming the next prime minister in the UK. The grain deal between Russia and Ukraine, brokered by Turkey and the UN, is definitely a silver lining. And who knows, maybe it's the first and not necessarily the last bit of good news to come the world's way over the next few weeks. More than 20 million tons of grain sitting in silos in Odesa can now be offloaded into tankers and shipped off to the needy world, boosting Ukraine's economy and saving millions in Africa, South America and elsewhere from starvation. Actually the first bit of good news, to be accurate, was the decision by Putin to switch back on the gas flow from the Nord Stream pipeline into Europe, after a maintenance shutdown period. Europe, especially Germany, was hugely relieved and, secretly thankful to Putin. The Russian leader is nothing if not clever. He is playing a massively complex, tricky and astute game here. First he gets his foreign minister Sergei Lavrov to hint that he wants a lot more Ukrainian territory than just the east and blames the US because of its delivery of heavweight artillery to Ukraine, then he switches the Nord Stream back on and approves the grain deal to prove to the world that he cares about the starving Africans. Now no one knows, probably not even the very clever Bill Burns, CIA director, what Putin might do next. Will it be another positive move or will he launch an even more intensive attack in Ukraine once his troops have had time to regroup and resupply? For the moment Putin will feel he is basking in the unspoken approval of the West over the grain deal. Putin doesn't care about the West's approval as such but what he does want to do is sow uncertainty and misgivings and disunity in the Nato alliance so that at some point one of the alliance members, probably Turkey, will say to Washington: "Hey stop sending these Himars rockets to Ukraine, it's not helping to bring the war to an end." Yes, Putin knows what he is doing. Step by step he is playing and winning the chess game. But he also knows he is not winning the war, or at least not achieving what he had originally set out to do. So expect more carrot and stick diplomacy from the Kremlin.