Russia's War Against Ukraine
OP-ED
Anne Applebaum: Putin’s power plays
A man with his dog walks by a mural depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Crinean city of Yalta, on September 19, 2015.
It is always tempting, when writing about the Russian president, to lapse into geopolitical waffle. Though the Cold War ended a quarter century ago, we are still accustomed to thinking of Vladimir Putin as a global actor, a representative of eternal Russian interests, the inheritor of czarism/Lenin/Stalin, a man who inhabits a Kissingerian world of state actors who compete against other state actors for control over territory, all of them playing a gigantic game of Risk.
