Russian President Vladimir Putin isn't acting irrationally in his invasion of Ukraine, but he made several flawed assumptions beforehand based on bad information and wishful thinking, Andrei Kozyrev, foreign minister of Russia from 1991 to 1996, argued on Twitter Sunday.
On Ukraine, Putin has long believed the country is not really a country at all and, "at best, should be a satellite state," Kozyrev writes. His hopes for indirect control of Ukraine were dashed in 2014's Maidan uprising, so force was his only other option, and "he also started to believe his own propagandists that Ukraine is run by a Nazi-Bandera junta."
So, "if you believe all three of the above to be true and your goal is to restore the glory of the Russian Empire (whatever that means), then it is perfectly rational to invade Ukraine," Kozyrev argues. "He miscalculated on all three, but that doesn't make him insane. Simply wrong and immoral." Read his entire thread to see how Kozyrev arrives at concluding Putin won't use nukes.
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