> Yeah well, he is an ultra-Neocon and the Neocons said the Ukraine war would not happen […] Perhaps the people who said those things thought Putin was bluffin

> Yeah well, he is an ultra-Neocon and the Neocons said the Ukraine war would not happen […] Perhaps the people who said those things thought Putin was bluffing, or that the response was going to be weak… kind of like it was in 2014. > And yet by all accounts, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been shrugging off threats of new sanctions if he attacks Ukraine. Maybe Putin is bluffing. But if so, he has taken his bluff very far, keeping more than 100,000 Russian troops in battle-ready positions through mid-winter. > Maybe, however, Putin has assessed that Western democracies’ threat to issue sanctions “like none he’s ever seen” is a bluff? He has some good basis to doubt European resolve. * https://archive.ph/eizpt https://archive.ph/eizpt / https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/europe-russia-energy-crisis-natural-gas-problem/621154/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/europe-rus... Of course if one understood Putin and his world view, it is hardly surprising: > Putin’s attachment to the old U.S.S.R. matters in another way as well. Although he is sometimes incorrectly described as a Russian nationalist, he is in fact an imperial nostalgist. The Soviet Union was a Russian-speaking empire, and he seems, at times, to dream of re-creating a smaller Russian-speaking empire within the old Soviet Union’s borders. * https://archive.ph/qqcKH https://archive.ph/qqcKH / https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/putin-ukraine-democracy/621465/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/putin-ukra...