Vladimir Putin is making big geopolitical changes strictly by exploiting his adversaries’ unwillingness to confront him. His Russia has no political or economic capacity to withstand any U.S. secondary trade boycott. But Putin bet that U.S. economic sanctions would be a joke, and won. His Russia has neither the military nor the political capacity to invade and occupy Ukraine. Putin knows that, outside of Crimea, a Russian army occupying Ukraine would be met by bloody resistance from a population every household of which lost relatives to Russia’s genocidal campaigns in Ukraine that began in the 1920s and did not end until the 1960s. And so, to take over government offices in Eastern Ukraine, Putin sent Russian special forces transparently disguised as, and mixed with, local sympathizers. He bet that the West (and the Ukrainian government that was looking to the West for help) would pretend to doubt that these fighters-without-insignia are Russian troops, while respecting them as if they were rather than treating them as what they are under international law: bandits to be shot on sight. Putin did not send them into Eastern Ukraine to fight—only to prove his opponents’ fecklessness.
Putin’s reason for confidence in American and European leaders’ fecklessness came from his 2008 military raid into Georgia, which practically annexed two of its provinces to Russia, put Eastern Europe on notice that Russia could work its will in the region unopposed, and led Americans as well as Europeans to work even harder at getting along with him.
Putin couches his demand regarding Ukraine inoffensively: “federation.” In practice, “federation” means that Putin’s people will own Ukraine’s eastern regions excluding Western influence. But these Russian-run regions will have a substantial say in what happens in the rest of Ukraine. They will be the handle by which Putin will handle Ukraine. Obama and the European Union are poised to agree to this, and to congratulate themselves on having avoided a Russian invasion—which was never in the cards.
Putin will then press the “federation” model on the other Eastern European lands that contain Russian minorities. Thus he will have re-created, if not the Soviet Union, then at least something like a Russian empire.
In absolute terms, it won’t be much of an empire. But against present-day Western statesmen, it will do as it pleases.
