Quote:There is a temptation to seek rational answers to these questions. The reason we are in this dark place is the failure of the rational to dominate in the Kremlin.We just do not know how far Putin -- who over the course of two weeks has tried to encircle a capital city, placed his strategic nuclear defenses on a higher level of alert, used cluster munitions and attacked a nuclear power plant -- will go. Again and again, the war fails to make sense. It seems to be outside the reaches of what I thought our shared reality was. We can only hope it does not stay that way.. Analysis: Vladimir Putin's clumsy military campaign in southern Ukraine makes little sense - CNN
Quote:French Marshal Ferdinand Foch once said that the first task is to answer the question De quoi s’agit-il?, or “What is it all about?” The answer with respect to Ukraine, as with most other strategic problems, is less straightforward than one might think. At the most basic level, a Russian autocrat is working to subjugate by the most brutal means possible a free and independent country, whose independence he has never accepted. But there are broader issues here as well. The other wars of the post–Cold War era could be understood or interpreted as the consequence of civil war and secession or tit-for-tat responses to aggression. Not the Russian attack on Ukraine.
This assault was unprovoked, unlimited in its objectives, and unconstrained in its means. It is, therefore, an assault not only on that country but on all international norms of decent behavior. A broader world order is at stake; so too is a narrower European order. Putin has made no secret of his bitter opposition to NATO and to the independence of former Soviet republics, and it should be expected that after reducing Ukraine, he would attempt something of a similar nature (if with less intensity) in the Baltic states. He has brought war in its starkest form back to a continent that has thrived largely in its absence for nearly three generations. And his war is a threat, too, to the integrity and self-confidence of the world’s liberal democracies, battered as they have been by internal disputes and backsliding abroad. The Strategy the West Needs to Beat Russia - The Atlantic