WaPo Op-Ed: Vladimir Putin lays out a menacing choice for the West

[MBS]

5. Shudder

especially this:

Mr. Putin was politely questioned by an assortment of Moscow-approved foreign journalists, scholars and former policymakers about Russia’s aggression in Ukraine — and out poured a poisonous mix of lies, conspiracy theories, thinly veiled threats of further aggression and, above all, seething resentment toward the United States.

. . . .
Mr. Putin portrayed the invasion of Crimea as the corrective to this “imperialism.” “The bear will not even bother to ask permission,” he boasted. “Here we consider it master of the taiga, and . . . it will not let anyone have its taiga.” He made it clear that most of Ukraine is part of the “taiga” over which the Kremlin claims dominion — and Ukraine, he warned, “will certainly not be the last” “example of such sorts of conflicts that affect [the] international power balance.”

Other nations “at the intersection of major states’ geopolitical interests,” Mr. Putin said, could suffer from “internal instability,” leading to “a whole set of violent conflicts with either direct or indirect participation by the world’s major powers.” NATO’s Baltic members, as former republics of the Soviet Union, will no doubt pay particular attention to that prediction. . .
. . . Judging from his rhetoric, Mr. Putin is offering the West a choice between ceding Russia its “taiga” — including dominion over Ukraine and whatever other parts of Eurasia that Mr. Putin chooses to claim — and “a whole set of violent conflicts.” No wonder that German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has talked to the Russian ruler more than any other Western statesman, described him as “in another world.”