A retired US general suggested on the sidelines of last week’s Munich Security Conference that Russia could “invest” the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. The general was not speaking about financial investment; he was reverting to the term’s meaning to describe the siege of a city rather than its occupation that went out of fashion once the Cold War ended.Despite assertions to the contrary, Putin is not irrational and on the rampage. On the contrary, he is a brinksman who has proven to be a brilliant tactician. He knows that his demand that NATO withdraws from Eastern Europe and promise to bar Ukraine from EU and NATO membership is unrealistic.With the recognition of the breakaway Ukrainian republics, he has demonstrated that he’s not worried about US and European sanctions. Russia has amassed some US$600 billion in reserves and reduced to 50% the amount of trade conducted in dollars.As a result, Putin, so far, can look at his sparking and manipulation of the Ukraine crisis as a success despite much of the world condemning Russia, as was evident in the United Nations Security Council debate and the caution with which China commented on the crisis.Beyond sending a chilling message to republics across the former Soviet Union, Putin has exposed weaknesses of the West at a time that liberal democracy is in crisis and under attack from illiberal and undemocratic elements on both the left and the right, some of which enjoy Russian empathy at the least.To be sure, Putin may have given NATO and Western solidarity a new lease of life, but the United States and Europe have yet to prove that they are up for the challenge. They have not developed an approach that acknowledges that the Russian leader is playing a long game despite assessing him as a tactician rather than a strategist.Sanctions are unlikely to project the United States and Europe as capable of preventing Putin from establishing his new world order in the former Soviet Union or in lands where he could artificially create outposts of the Russian world by supporting Russian-language education as he is trying to do in the Central African Republic.
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