The Reason Putin Would Risk War
There are questions about troop numbers, questions about diplomacy. There are questions about the Ukrainian military, its weapons, and its soldiers. There are questions about Germany and France: How will they react? There are questions about America, and how it has come to be a central player in a conflict not of its making. But of all the questions that repeatedly arise about a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine, the one that gets the least satisfactory answers is this one: Why?
Why would Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, attack a neighboring country that has not provoked him? Why would he risk the blood of his own soldiers? Why would he risk sanctions, and perhaps an economic crisis, as a result? And if he is not really willing to risk these things, then why is he playing this elaborate game?
[Anne Applebaum: The U.S. is naive about Russia. Ukraine can’t afford to be.]
To explain why requires some history, but not the semi-mythological, faux-medieval history Putin has used in the past to declare that Ukraine is not a country, or that its existence is an accident, or that its sense of nationhood is not real. Nor do we need to know that much about the more recent history of Ukraine or its 70 years as a Soviet republic—though it is true that the
