Jan Techau of Carnegie Europe writes:
….In recent years, Russian President Vladimir Putin has talked about the Kremlin’s fears of Western encirclement. He has declared that EU and NATO enlargement are part of a conspiracy to destroy Russia, that Ukraine is not really a sovereign nation, and that Western agents provocateurs were behind Ukraine’s 2004–2005 Orange Revolution.
Amid all that rhetoric, the West failed to recognize that Putin was deadly serious. Such talk was dismissed either as cheap propaganda or as the mild lunacy of a handful of overideologized true believers. Nobody imagined that Putin himself really believed his own bluster.
But for the Russian president, the fight over Ukraine is not an imperialistic adventure, it is a fight for survival against a mortal Western enemy. Just because observers in the West know that’s nonsense, that doesn’t mean that others think the same. Such Western projections were finally debunked when German Chancellor Angela Merkel remarked to U.S. President Barack Obama on March 2 that Putin was “in another world.”
Read more at Europe’s Five Deadly Sins on Ukraine – Carnegie Europe.