Max Fisher, Vox.com Foreign Editor: Russia is invading Europe in 2014.
This is a big deal.
CNN Anchor: "The Russian military now being directly involved in fighting Ukrainian government
forces."
Samantha Power: "Satellite imagery show Russian combat units -- combat units southeast of
Donetsk in Eastern Ukraine."
So President Obama, western leaders, everybody is furious about this.
Obama: "Russia has deliberately and repeatedly violated the sovereignty and territorial integrity
of Ukraine."
To understand why this all happening in Ukraine, you have to go actually have to go back to
2012, which is when Russian President Vladimir Putin ran for re-election.
There were big protests in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and a couple other places.
He completely panicked, and that's when he shifted political strategies from economic
growth to anti-western paranoia, conservative Christian orthodoxy, and a Russian imperial
revival of nationalism.
Then jump ahead to November 2013, that's when the Ukraine crisis breaks out.
You have protesters in Kiev that want to topple the pro-Russian government and replace it
with a pro-European government.
Putin sees this as a direct threat, fomented by the Americans against Russia.
When the government falls, that's when he invades to annex Crimea.
He gains a huge popularity boost in Russia over this, it works out for him wonderfully
politically.
And he gets addicted to it.
And that's why shortly after that, he starts supporting these pro-Russia separatist rebels
in Eastern Ukraine.
The rebels take over a couple of cities, Putin starts escalating, and in July he hands the
rebels these very sophisticated surface-to-air missiles which they use to shoot down Malaysian
Airlines flight 17.
CNN anchor: "US officials say pro-Russian rebels are responsible"
Ukraine is fed up, the west is fed up, Ukrainian military moves in to re-take these eastern
cities, and actually push out a number of these rebels.
Putin really panics because he thinks he's going to lose everything and has bared this
huge cost of economic sanctions for doing it.
He couldn't afford to build up the crisis as so crucial for Russia and then just kind
of watch these rebels lose.
So he was pulled into an invasion that clearly is not going to work out in his long term
strategic interests.
And the thing that makes that so scary is that if that's the case, that means he has
no strategy, it means he has no actual objective that he's trying to achieve, and it means
that there's no clear end in sight for this crisis.