The Kremlin Puts Its Cards on the Table with Ukraine

Russia makes its wishes known as Putin threatens his neighbor with invasion and the rising Ukraine crisis exposes the pretensions of declining American hegemony

We’ve been here before, indeed recently. In the spring, Moscow turned the heat up on Ukraine by moving some 80,000 troops to the borders of its neighbor, nearly 30 battalion tactical groups (the basic combined arms building blocks of Russia’s ground forces), in an effort to intimidate Kyiv and win concessions. That crisis eventually passed, with Russian…