New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

by David E. Sanger

Yet there was little appetite, particularly beyond Ukraine, for making Putin pay a heavy price for the invasion. The United States was in no mood to tangle with Putin over a piece of territory that had changed hands—and governments—several times over the previous few centuries. The Germans had made clear that they did not want to endanger their gas supplies or their broader relationship with Moscow. The rest of Europe was divided, and there was considerable wariness over Ukraine’s well-deserved reputation for corruption. Now that Putin held Crimea, the Europeans argued, he wouldn’t go beyond the Russian-speaking part of the Donbas—Ukraine was too big to swallow, and a full invasion was too risky for Russia’s economic future. The argument assumed that Putin was driven by the same economic logic that was guiding European leaders: in short, projecting European and American thinking onto an authoritarian regime that Bill Burns argued was sustained largely by “high energy prices and wounded pride.” And it ignored when he had signaled his intention, at Munich in 2007 and after. There was one more miscalculation in the mix, and it was Putin’s. He got away with taking a piece of Ukraine in 2014. Why couldn’t he get away with taking all of it in 2022?