[annalex]

In the thread I posted the other day, NATO warns Russia to cease and desist in Ukraine, I was trying to make the following point: Putin and his environment do not want Russian Federation to become politically isolated, be imposed sanctions and have their personal accounts frozen -- not because they care all that much for the people they govern, but because the RF's political elite is thoroughly westernized on the personal level. They invest in real estate in Europe, educate their children in the West, they have amassed fortunes in foreign banks. Any sanctions regime would hurt them badly, just like the Magnitsky law in the US did, but on a far vaster scale. So, I reasoned, Putin is likely to strike a deal with Ukraine soon, take his chips and go home before the West turned around with the sanctions.

Here is the opposite theory: It is precisely the familiarity with the modern West on the elite level that emboldened Putin. His aggression in Ukraine is likely to go on.

I would put the emphases a bit differently, but I think his is a plausible theory as well. My chief corrective to Ben Judah's piece is that the Putin circle in RF is culturally unable to see past their cynicism, so their conclusion that Europe is all wimps and Obama is incapable of rational action is on a shaky ground because they assume their own cynicism to prevail with everyone else.

What do you think?

[bert]

If Russia no longer feared the west it would have interstates or autobahns.

No hiways thwart invasion. A Ukrainian buffer thwarts invasion

[x]

Some of the statements are a little questionable. The Caucasus was also important to Russian romanticism (Lermontov, etc.). Voluntarily or otherwise, Russians did go to Kazakhstan: they were the largest ethnic group there in the 1960s and 1970s.

[annalex]

Who Will Stop Putin's Aggression