The two countries’ decisions are a damning rebuke to the strategic foresight of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin
foreign ministers were meeting to discuss Ukraine and the alliance’s new strategic concept in the run-up to a summit next month. Despite grumbling from Turkey, their
Mr Putin’s regime has responded by cutting electricity supplies across the border and threatening “military-technical” action, whatever that means. He is not the first Russian leader to object to the alliance’s enlargement. Back in the 1990s Boris Yeltsin complained when members of the old Warsaw Pact applied to join. Over the years this hardened into the line of argument cited by Mr Putin as justification for massing troops on Ukraine’s border.
Such security dilemmas are common in the study of international relations, and one no doubt exists between Russia and the West. But to blame the West for triggering it is scarcely credible. One reason is domestic. Mr Putin has increasingly used nationalism and Orthodox religion to shore up his rule. He needs enemies abroad to persuade his people that they and their civilisation are under threat. Seizing territory in Georgia in 2008 and in Ukraine in 2014 and today has been part of that game.
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