>It’s impossible to determine Putin’s personal motivations from outside; the best we can do is speculate. Russia has no convenient geographic features to prote

>It’s impossible to determine Putin’s personal motivations from outside; the best we can do is speculate. Russia has no convenient geographic features to protect it from invasion, so it relies on long distances. Those distances are much shorter than they used to be, and Russian doctrine for at least the past decade has been focused on creating confusion and chaos in Eastern Europe. The chaos is here, and they probably misread the international community on what they could get away with. Now that they're in it, though, I think Putin is the biggest obstacle to Russia extricating themselves from the debacle.