The new government in Kiev was pro-Western and anti-Russian to the core, and it contained four high-ranking members who could legitimately be labeled neofascists.
.. Putin’s actions should be easy to comprehend. A huge expanse of flat land that Napoleonic France, imperial Germany, and Nazi Germany all crossed to strike at Russia itself, Ukraine serves as a buffer state of enormous strategic importance to Russia. No Russian leader would tolerate a military alliance that was Moscow’s mortal enemy until recently moving into Ukraine. Nor would any Russian leader stand idly by while the West helped install a government there that was determined to integrate Ukraine into the West.
.. In essence, the two sides have been operating with different playbooks: Putin and his compatriots have been thinking and acting according to realist dictates, whereas their Western counterparts have been adhering to liberal ideas about international politics.
War as a Distraction
Recently Justin Fox of the Harvard Business Review suggested that the roots of the Ukraine crisis may lie in the faltering performance of the Russian economy. As he noted, Mr. Putin’s hold on power partly reflects a long run of rapid economic growth. But Russian growth has been sputtering — and you could argue that the Putin regime needed a distraction.
.. And if authoritarian regimes without deep legitimacy are tempted to rattle sabers when they can no longer deliver good performance, think about the incentives China’s rulers will face if and when that nation’s economic miracle comes to an end — something many economists believe will happen soon.
The West Has Cornered Putin—and That’s When He’s Most Dangerous
There have been many instances of Putin unpleasantly surprising his adversaries, who thought they had him cornered. There was the time that protests were growing over the construction of Moscow-St. Petersburg road (by a French company) as it was going to cut through a protected Russian forest. Putin halted construction, waited for public attention to shift away, and resumed the project. There were the anti-Putin protests that brought tens of thousands of Muscovites into the streets in 2011-2012. The authorities let everyone go home, even after the protest turned violent, thinking it had all blown over. Then, a couple months later, they started rounding up dozens of protesters and handing out hard prison time for throwing lemons at cops in Kevlar vests.
Vox: How MH17 is affecting Europe’s Russia policy
The Netherlands is not a geopolitical powerhouse, but they do have two interests that bear directly on Russia-EU relations. One is that the Netherlands is a major tax haven for Russian oligarchs, and a center for activity verging on money laundering that has the ability to hit influential Russians in the pocketbook. The other is that the Netherlands is home to a large and currently underutilized terminal for importing liquid natural gas. If EU-Russian relations deteriorated sufficiently to halt Russian exports of gas to Europe, the Dutch terminal would be the big winner.