The Russian president gathers his most trusted advisers in the Kremlin. The time has come, he informs them, to test Nato’s credibility and the strength of its mutual defence principle. “We all know Nato is no longer what it once was, especially now that we’ve got a friend in the White House,” the president says. “What if we sent a few drones bound for Ukraine on a little detour through Poland?”

This fictional scene is absent from Carlo Masala’s book If Russia Wins, a bestseller when it was published in Germany earlier this year, and now translated into English by Olena Ebel and Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp. But it’s a scene that could have easily featured. Last week’s Russian drone incursions in Polish airspace, which sent alarm bells ringing at Nato headquarters, mirror the kind of incidents that Masala deploys in his crisp thought experiment.

In his scenario, a ceasefire signed in Geneva between Ukraine and Russia serves as the trigger for a chain of events that unravels Europe’s post-second world war security order. “Scenarios expand the realm of possibilities in our minds,” he writes in the introduction. “What is at stake in Ukraine and in our time only really sinks in when we think about what could happen if things do not turn out well.”