Russia-Ukraine live updates: Putin meets Belarus’s president; ‘Brutal tactics’ expected in Russia’s push east
More than six weeks into his war against Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin is feeling the sting of failure.
Thousands of Russian battlefield deaths. Three front-line retreats by the Russian military. Millions of Ukrainians who will never forgive Moscow. More isolation than ever — and perilously few goals achieved.
How could Russia — a country with such deep familial, cultural and historic ties to its western neighbor — get Ukraine so wrong?
Officials in the United States and Europe are piecing together the answer to that question. What emerges, those officials say, is a picture of a hubristic and isolated leader, beset by biases and skewed information, pressing forward with a calamitous decision without consulting his full cohort of advisers. Putin rushed headlong into Ukraine, confident in his ability to secure a quick victory and weather any blowback within the authoritarian system he erected at home, they said. Underpinning his assumptions: misconceptions about Ukraine fundamentally rooted in Moscow’s colonial past.