If You Want to Constrain Putin, Do the Obvious

Vladimir Putin is engaged in the most extreme option he had available in Ukraine: a full-scale mechanized invasion of the country.

Many experts doubted Putin would go so far. He could instead have simply sent Russian troops to fully occupy the Donbas, the eastern province of Ukraine that included the breakaway Russian puppet “states” of Donetsk and Luhansk. NATO’s response would have been tepid, and Russia would have emerged with a solid win: the further dismemberment of Ukraine and the deepening of divisions within NATO about the seriousness of the Russian threat.