Okay, some decent stuff from Roger Cohen who for some years now has been hiding under his grandfather's bed in Lithuania.
According to Rog, the symbolism of that sterile, white table, of Putin isolated, sitting 20 feet away from Macron is real.
A senior French official at the presidency, who insisted on anonymity in line with government practice, described the Russian leader’s speech [announcing recognition of the independence of two Ukrainian provinces] as at once “rigid and, I would say, paranoid.”
This, he suggested, was in keeping with the man Mr. Macron found at the end of a 20-foot table in the Kremlin earlier this month, and later described to journalists on his plane as more stiff, isolated and ideologically unyielding than at their previous meeting in 2019.
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Still, [there is method in Putin's madness].
...Putin...has been relentlessly building his case against NATO expansion to Russia’s borders and against Western democracies since the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008.
The open question is whether Mr. Putin has become weaker or stronger as a result of this drive.
No, the open question is why the West has fed his paranoid "obsession" by continuing to insist that NATO reserves the right to move yet eastward.
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Russia has moved aggressively in the apparent conviction that no provocation outside NATO countries will bring armed American reprisal.
That is a correct appraisal by Putin.
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Mr. Biden has made clear that no American troops will be sent to die for Ukraine. ...
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NATO expansion eastward after the fall of the Berlin Wall was designed to secure and safeguard the freedom of 100 million central Europeans who had escaped the Soviet imperium. It worked. One thing Mr. Putin has not done is threaten Poles or Romanians with renewed Russian subjugation.
That is true, NATO expansion was aimed at protecting central Europeans from Russia but Cohen knows that we have not said that to Russia. We have said, "It's not about you." Cohen knows this too: Russia wanted to be like us. Their leaders said it to our leaders. Gorbachev let all the former Soviet satellites go. "See, be like you!" But we didn't trust Russia. How we could think that Russia cut loose from all of the Warsaw Pact satellites and not intend to let them go permanently is inexplicable.
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... American officials argue that he has galvanized and united a NATO alliance that was casting around for a raison d’être.
BINGO! There you have it. It's the bureaucratic imperative. "What are we going to do now? We have no raison d'etre!" When the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist NATO should have ceased to exist.
We should have met the Russians halfway. Instead we lied to them about
our intentions and expanded east. We lie when we tell them today, "It's
not about you." It IS about them, it was always about them. Who is being
paranoid and irrational here? Not Putin! Russia would not be invading Ukraine, nor would they have invaded Georgia if not for this. We caused this.
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... Russia’s demand that NATO commit to never admitting Ukraine has been met by the West’s insistence that NATO’s door will remain open, even if nobody is prepared to say how Ukraine would ever squeeze through that door.
Its price, however, has been the festering alienation of Russia, which felt it had been betrayed by NATO at its border. This anger was redoubled in 2008 when NATO leaders issued a summit declaration in Bucharest saying that Ukraine and Georgia, once part of the Soviet Union, “will become members of NATO.”