Will Vladimir Putin be remembered as the man who broke Russia?
That once seemed unthinkable. For more than a decade, Mr. Putin outmaneuvered a series of clueless Western leaders. The Russian leader’s penetrating and unsentimental understanding of his opponents let him inflict one humiliating setback after another on an overconfident West. Among those humiliations were the 2008 invasion of Georgia, the 2014 seizure of Crimea and much of the Donbas, and the revival of Russian power in the Middle East while President Obama walked away from his red line in Syria. The defense of Belarus’s President Alexander Lukashenko against a tsunami of popular protests and the displacement of French power across much of France’s former colonial empire in Africa also advanced Mr. Putin’s goal of making Russia great again.
But then the master of the Kremlin made a critical error. Ukraine wasn’t a real country, he reasoned. Its people weren’t nationalist. Its government was a hollow shell.