The Washington Post examines the roots of Russian thug and war criminal Vladimir Putin's gross miscalculation of Ukraine's desire for independence and willingness to fight for it:
"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.
'Historically, there just hasn’t been expertise on Ukraine in Russia at all,' said Alina Polyakova, president and CEO of the Washington-based Center for European Policy Analysis. 'When you don’t believe a country’s a real country and a people’s a real people, why would you invest any expertise in a thing you don’t think exists?'” (our emphasis)
