Vladimir Putin has made a strategic mistake. Perhaps it was his increasing age, massive wealth, and accompanying sense of entitlement, or maybe it was an aspect of his personal and political isolation within the walls of the Kremlin. It could be that after the United States’ humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan and the ascendency of soft-power approaches to foreign policy throughout the West that he believed the age of autocrats had returned and that he and his friend Xi Jinping are about enter upon a wave of victories. Whatever the reason, the man who has played his bad hand of cards perhaps better than any political leader since Canning has badly misstepped and now will reap the whirlwind.
This is not to say that Putin will be immediately routed from his illegally claimed positions in Ukraine. If he chooses to not press for a full invasion of the largest geographic nation of Europe, he will likely hold his positions in the Donbas region and Crimea for some time to come. Neither Europe nor the United States is either ready or willing to come to the aid of the nation that deployed its military forces alongside them to both Iraq and Afghanistan based upon the justification that it never formally became a member of NATO. So tenuous is the sense of national honor throughout the West and short-termed is the memory of history that there is little chance that Ukraine will be able to attract any sense of reciprocity from Europe or the United States. Should Putin stand pat following his recognition of the two Ukrainian regions as independent entities and subsequent military occupation of them, he would be able to consolidate his gains and slowly begin the process to absorb them into Russia. That would be the smart play, but he doesn’t appear likely to do that.
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