'Why is Putin doing this? Because he can.'

(Image credit: Marianna Massey/Getty Images for USOC)

last updated 8 January 2015

That's from Julia Ioffe's excellent analysis of the crisis in Ukraine. Head over to The New Republic to read it. Spoiler alert: She is not optimistic that this will end well.

Neither America nor NATO can stop this. They've shown they won't in Georgia, because nobody wants to start a war with nuclear-armed Russia, and rightly so. So while Washington and Brussels huff and puff about lines and sovereignty and diplomacy, Russia will do what it needs to do and there's not a thing we can do about it.