Carnegie Moscow Center
Those who believe that the Kremlin will be satisfied with Crimea and will agree to return to a new “reset” do not understand the nature of the Russian personalized power and its logic that tries to prolong its life at the expense of breaking the rules and even destroying the world order.
Russia’s economic, political and strategic environment in the West is fast deteriorating. One obvious way to respond to this is to reach out to Asia and the Pacific.
All of Putin’s actions, such as annexation of Crimea, trying to suffocate Ukraine, and trying to contain the United States and West in general, are a response to his domestic agenda. To survive, Putin wants to return to the old militaristic Russia and to become a war president.
Moscow has long been unhappy about some of the rules of the game set after the end of the Cold War, such as the West’s dominance, but now it feels strong and confident enough to challenge them.
The Kremlin wants to legalize the annexation of Crimea to Russia as soon as possible because it is trying to present the world with an accomplished fact while the West is still confused and lacks effective means to stop Russia.
The West’s sanctions will be damaging to Russia and its people. However, standing up to Western pressure is likely to become the main feature of a newborn Russian patriotism and the central element of national consolidation.
Putin sees himself as repairing the damage done a quarter century ago by Gorbachev and Yeltsin. He is challenging not only the 1991 geopolitical arrangements but an entire world order in which only the United States has the right to decide what is right and what is wrong.
From the perspective of Putin and his associates, Ukraine is a red line and the West, in the form of NATO, was crossing it.
The Crimea referendum, in which the people of the region have massively voted to join Russia, marks a watershed in Russia’s foreign policy: Russia has stopped walking backward and has made a step forward. As for Ukraine, it will be for the foreseeable future a geopolitical battleground.
A second Cold War is emerging because of the mistakes that were made by both Russia and the West at the end of the first Cold War and during the inter-Cold War period.