How the West Misread Vladimir Putin
Western powers and their allies have lined up to oppose Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. They can’t say he didn’t warn them. Fifteen years ago, the former KGB officer railed against U.S. domination of global affairs and assailed the post-Cold War security order as a threat to his country. In the years that followed, he grabbed portions of Georgia, annexed Crimea and sent troops into Ukraine’s Donbas region. Mr. Putin sent repeated signals that he intended to widen Russia’s sphere of influence and cast the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s eastward expansion as an existential threat to Moscow’s security. He made plain he viewed Ukraine as part of Russia. Yet until recently few Western leaders imagined Mr. Putin would go through with a full-scale invasion, having miscalculated his determination to use force—on a scale that recalls the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968—to restore Russian control over the nations on its periphery.
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Mr. Putin’s all-out assault on Ukraine has put the West on its back foot, where it is now struggling to find ways to deter the Kremlin’s aggression and to influence a Russian leader who has openly expressed disdain for the West and called into doubt its willingness to take decisive action. The costs of the West’s failure to deter Russia are now being borne by Ukraine, which for 14 years has existed in a strategic purgatory: marked for potential membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization but never admitted into the alliance and the security guarantees that it provided. Longer term, the invasion has ruptured the already chilly relations between the Western alliance and Moscow. When Mr. Putin’s forces invaded Georgia in 2008 after it was promised eventual NATO membership, and recognized two breakaway areas, the West reacted by temporarily suspending dialogue, before returning to business as usual. Sanctions imposed after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 also didn’t bite. In recent months, senior U.S. officials have laid out Mr. Putin’s invasion plans. The misreading of Mr. Putin, however, cuts across multiple U.S. administrations.
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The attack exposes complacency in Europe, which allowed its military to shrink and did little to reduce its energy dependency on Russia, despite Moscow’s increasingly aggressive behavior, which included cyberattacks on Western targets. Even as the West imposes sanctions on Russia, it is sending hundreds of millions of dollars daily to pay for Russian gas. Western leaders took comfort in the limited nature of Mr. Putin’s earlier military interventions. Those were considered deniable, smaller-scale operations that sought to mask the extent of Russia’s role. Russian actions also included hacks on the Democratic National Committee in 2016 and cyber attacks on its neighbors. The U.S. and its allies neither marshaled the military and economic leverage to forestall his invasion of Ukraine nor presented a major diplomatic concession, such as halting NATO expansion.
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Mr. Putin’s suspicions toward the West became more pronounced with the so-called colored revolutions beginning in 2004 that toppled leaders of former Soviet states, and later with the Arab Spring. NATO had meanwhile continued its expansion to Eastern European countries that had been in the Soviet-aligned Warsaw Pact in 1999 and then in 2004, when the alliance was also enlarged to cover the three Baltic states that had been part of the Soviet Union. The U.S. and its allies saw enlargement as a way to encourage reform in the newly emerging democracies. NATO’s new members were looking to sit under the U.S. security umbrella should Russia threaten to absorb them again. Mr. Putin’s anger over enlargement became clear in a speech he made at the annual Munich Security Conference in 2007, where he surprised his audience as he railed against the unipolar world dominated by the U.S. There he laid out his grievances against NATO expansion, leveling allegations of broken promises from the West that NATO wouldn’t shift eastward and depicting enlargement as a threat to Russia.
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/putin-invaded-ukraine-west-misread-russia-11645822427 (subscription)
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he wants to be coddled? Too much military buildup, threatening him? Not enough military buildup, not threatening him enough? Too many or the wrong sanctions, isolating and angering him, hurting ordinary Russians and making them hate us? Not enough sanctions, or not the right kind, or not long enough--slap on the wrist? NATO's very existence angers him, but if we dissolve it he'll invade his neighbors again...but appeasing him is wrong... but he only sliced off a little of this territory over here, should we start world war three over THAT little piece of land?
Someday the western world is going to find just the right exact combination of policies and flattery and toughness and dancing to his tune and we'll finally have peace! 
