All week, Moscow has been in response mode, swatting at volleys coming out of the Trump administration. When Flynn tendered his resignation, Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, dismissed it as a “domestic issue,” nothing more than an HR matter. The next day, though, The New York Times published a story that said members of Trump’s presidential campaign had had “repeated contacts” with Russian intelligence agents, which Russians dismissed as nonsense. “We have heard a huge amount of unproven accusations against Trump and Putin and Russian intelligence, and it’s all a green dog,” Sergei Markov told me when I asked him about it. Markov, a Western liberal turned Putinist hawk, served for several years in the lower house of the Russian parliament, and is now a member of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation and runs his own think tank. “I don’t know what that means either, but aesthetically, I feel it’s a green dog,” he explained. “It’s a nonsensical thing. There’s no proof.”

But before those allegations could be properly digested, they were sandwiched between two inflammatory White House statements on an issue sacred to the Russians: Crimea. “President Trump has made it very clear that he expects the Russian government to de-escalate violence in Ukraine and return Crimea,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer said on Tuesday. “At the same time, he fully expects to and wants to be able to get along with Russia.” If Moscow could ignore U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley’s hardline speech on Ukraine earlier this month as that of a lower-level official whose post neither Trump nor Putin take seriously, it’s hard to ignore a message coming from the White House, and the Russians felt compelled to respond. “We don’t need to bring this topic up at all,” said the speaker of the Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, from the floor of the parliament. “Some press secretary somewhere said something. … Listen, focus on fulfilling your campaign promises. Everything was said during the campaign: fixing relations with Russia, with China, fighting terrorism. If you fulfill your campaign promises, everything will be fine.”

But by the following morning, it wasn’t some press secretary somewhere saying something, it was the President of the United States, tweeting “Crimea was TAKEN by Russia during the Obama Administration. Was Obama too soft on Russia?”

Now the Kremlin itself was forced to respond. “In regards to returning Crimea, this topic will not be discussed, for it cannot be discussed,” said Peskov. “Russia does not discuss questions regarding its territory with its international partners.” He added, “We are still counting on establishing a line of communication and that we’ll have the opportunity for a business-like discussion, and to get our point of view across to our American partners in a calm and constructive manner.”