Meanwhile, in Russia, the President’s personal ratings have begun to suffer as a result of the troubled economy and falling ruble, under ever-increasing pressure from continued sanctions and the volatility of the oil price, Russia’s main foreign revenue earner. GDP has fallen by around four percent annually since 2014. Despite this, defense spending has risen, as planned, by forty percent in the last three years. The President’s popularity has never recovered properly from the humiliation in 2015 of a Russian tourist jet being blown to pieces by jihadists over Sinai and a warplane being shot down by the Turkish Air Force, and his failure to take revenge. The President knows he needs to balance the economic books, or do something remarkable, if he is to regain the massive levels of popular support he enjoyed in those heady days after the successful invasion of Crimea in spring 2014.

His solution: to resolve, once and for all, the Ukraine problem and so fulfill the blood-stirring promise he made to the Russian people in his Crimea victory speech in 2014, that Russia and Ukraine are “one nation” and “Kiev is the mother of Russian cities.” The President now needs to engineer the circumstances to allow him to do this.

Thus it is that a potentially dangerous situation has been made very much worse, because the President has been emboldened by the continued disunity and weakness of the West in the three years since he first annexed Crimea and captured parts of Ukraine. In the face of this, rather than being persuaded to abide by international law, the President has decided to attempt further foreign adventures, particularly when his analysts in the FSB— Russia’s external intelligence agency and successor to the KGB—assure him that the promises made in 2014 at the NATO Summit and ratified in Warsaw in 2016, “to strengthen collective defense,” have not been met. They tell him that its decision to deploy four battalions to the Baltic States and eastern Poland, far from building a credible deterrence, NATO is erecting a Potemkin village.1

In short, NATO has failed to send the necessary strong signals that it is ready and capable of implementing collective defense and, in time of crisis, manning up to the Article 5 Guarantee that decrees that an attack on one NATO member is an attack on all NATO members; the very cornerstone of the NATO alliance.

The President’s principal military advisor, the Chief of the Russian General Staff, has further assured him that NATO lacks the knowledge, capability, and military hardware necessary to match Russia’s ever-improving conventional capability. The Americans have disbanded their two heavy brigades in Germany, reduced their stationed forces in Europe to a handful, and would be hard pressed to redeploy to Europe quickly enough to respond to a potential Russian ground threat to NATO territory.