Russia's War Against Ukraine
OP-ED
Edward Lucas: Where is Putin?
A woman looks at Russian President Vladimir Putin speaking as she watches an internet broadcast of the documentary \"Homeward Bound\", on March 15 in Moscow. Putin said he was ready to put the country's nuclear forces on alert as he sought to annex Crimea last year after the fall of a Moscow-backed government in Kiev. Speaking in a documentary aired on state TV in Russia on March 15, 2015, a year after the takeover of the Black Sea Peninsula from Ukraine, Putin showed the lengths he was willing to go to in order to protect Russian-speaking citizens of the province he considered a historic slice of Russia.
Prescient or preposterous? Vladimir Putin's absence from public life sparked a frenzy last week. Nobody agreed what was going on, but almost all commentators agreed that it was significant. As Leonid Bershidsky noted, no other kind of state would be so opaque, nor its citizens so preoccupied with their ruler.
