Up to a hundred soldiers reportedly are dying each day during Russia’s war in eastern Ukraine, Russian missiles are killing shoppers at Ukrainian malls, and the Kremlin spokesman has just said that Sigmund Freud would have loved to analyze the British prime minister. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov’s remark came after Prime Minister Johnson suggested that Vladimir Putin would not have embarked on his “crazy macho war” had he been a woman instead of man. 

“Old Freud during his lifetime would have dreamed of such an object for research,” Mr. Peskov told the Russian state-run news agency RIA Novosti.

Mr. Johnson, attending the NATO summit at Madrid, had earlier told the German broadcaster ZDF: “If you want a perfect example of toxic masculinity, it’s what [Putin] is doing in Ukraine.” He was seconded by his defense secretary, Ben Wallace, who according to the Times of London told a British radio station that “Putin is a lunatic with small man syndrome.”

The surreal trading of sexism-tinged barbs started earlier this week in a stuffy conference room at the G-7 summit in Germany, where Mr. Johnson kidded with his Canadian counterpart, Justin Trudeau, about doffing their jackets in order to mock a series of infamous photographs of a shirtless Vladimir Putin on a horse. After Mr. Trudeau stated, “We’re going to get the bare-chested horseback riding display,” Mr. Johnson replied, “There you go: We’ve got to show them our pecs.” 

There is not much during these global parleys that goes unnoticed at Moscow, despite or because of the Russian strongman’s by now customarily conspicuous absence, and that bit of repartee was no exception. It prompted the Kremlin-friendly tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda to quip that “the former gynecologist” Ursula von der Leyen did not want to show her “pectoral muscles” to Vladimir Putin because “they probably don’t impress him.” The president of the European Commission, Ms. von der Leyen also holds a medical degree from Hannover Medical School in Germany.

In the event, that paper said and it can be confirmed that Mr. Johnson “failed to take a topless photo of his colleagues, and, willy-nilly, they had to move on to less important issues on the agenda, such as what else they could do to Russia.”

Amusing, to a degree, but against the backdrop of the deadliest European land war in memory and with the weighty matter of bolstering the NATO military alliance in the face of Russia’s war machine, one could ask whether it is a time  for levity. The answer is apparently for now in the affirmative.