Russia has experienced a difficult thirty years searching for its place among nations. The US hasn’t made it easier, inducting the former East European satellites of the USSR into NATO, bullying Russia’s former client-states along the country’s southern rim and around the Mediterranean. China, which maintained Communist-party control while opening its economy to the world, has rocketed past its rival.
Boris Yeltsin anointed Vladimir Putin as his successor because the former KGB officer was “thoughtful, democratic, and innovative – yet steadfast in the military manner.” And for or twenty-two years, Vladimir Putin has done a pretty good job of rebuilding the social fabric, economic infrastructure, and military forces of his country, while navigating the narrow corridor between authoritarian rule and anarchy – until last week.
But as New York Times Moscow bureau chief Anton Troianovski wrote Thursday,
His attack on Ukraine negated that image, and revealed him as an altogether different leader: one dragging the nuclear superpower he helms into a war with no foreseeable conclusion, one that by all appearances will end Russia’s attempts over its three post-Soviet decades to find a place in a peaceful world order.
The war on its neighbor Ukraine is a tragedy, for all involved, most all for Russia. Fred Weir of The Christian Science Monitor, a special correspondent and long-time Moscow resident, supplied the clearest view. The assault “amounts to a war of regime change,” patterned on America’s war against Iraq.
Very few Russian security analysts were picking up their phones Thursday. It seems many have been blindsided by the speed with which Mr. Putin has acted after spelling out his grievances in a lengthy speech officially recognizing two east Ukrainian rebel republics barely three days earlier.
But those who did claimed that the operation – which none will call an “invasion” – was going well, that Russia has established dominance in the air, that much of Ukraine’s military and command-and-control infrastructure had already been greatly reduced, the Ukrainian army in the Donbass region surrounded, and many strategic points seized by Russian special forces.