Putin's saber-rattling over Ukraine is part of his long-time strategy of obfuscation: 'If everything is clear, then immediately his ability to threaten falls”
Russian armored personnel carriers deployed during Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea.While stunting Russia’s economic growth, these measures didn’t undermine Mr. Putin’s hold on power or his ability to develop increasingly advanced military capabilities. With over $630 billion in accumulated reserves, an all-time high, the country has enough of a financial cushion to withstand immediate pressure.
Ukraine, which has sought to sever this interdependence with Russia ever since the 2014 military invasion, plays an outsize role in the current confrontation because, in Mr. Putin’s eyes, it isn’t really a foreign land. It’s the loss of Ukraine, which was the second-most-populous and most-industrially advanced former Soviet republic, that lies at the root of Moscow’s dramatically diminished global standing.
“He cannot imagine Ukraine to not be a part of the Russian sphere of interests. He believes that one day there will be a change of the political guard in Ukraine and Ukraine will get back to Russia,” said Vygaudas Usackas, who met Mr. Putin several times in his roles as the European Union’s ambassador to Moscow and as Lithuania’s foreign minister. “It’s also a political imperative not to allow the West to expand to Ukraine: It may then empower Russians to follow suit.
“The thinking is: If it is inevitable, strike first. Let’s continue to escalate because it seems like the cost of inaction may be higher at the end of the day,” said Maxim Suchkov, a senior foreign-policy expert at the Valdai Discussion Club, a Moscow-based think tank and discussion forum whose annual conference is usually attended by Mr. Putin.
“We’ll whack them in their outhouses,” Mr. Putin promised ahead of a military campaign that caused huge numbers of civilian casualties and ended with the installation of a former Chechen separatist-turned-loyalist as the region’s ruler. To many Western leaders, Russia’s demands to be taken as an equal were laughable. The country’s economy was roughly half the size of Spain’s and almost entirely dependent on gas-and-oil exports, its military a shadow of its former self.
Mr. Putin’s speech at an international conference in Munich in February 2007 signaled Russia’s determination to start hitting back. The United States, he complained, “has overstepped its national borders in every way,” and the NATO expansion was “a serious provocation that reduces everyone’s trust.” Russia’s takeaway, he added, was that now “we must think about ensuring our own security.”The U.S. didn’t pay attention to his warnings.
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