Perspectives: Misreading Putin: New Concerns from NATO and the British House of Lords

European Affairs

Perspectives: Misreading Putin: New Concerns from NATO and the British House of Lords  

By John Barry, Former Defense and National Security Correspondent at Newsweek Magazine

http://www.europeaninstitute.org/index.php/238-european-affairs/ea-october2-2014/1988-auto-generate-from-title
Through the past year, German Chancellor Merkel and President Obama – architects of the West’s responses in Ukraine -- were united in choosing to see Putin’s actions as less threatening, his ambitions less expansive.  That was the bedrock of their partnership on the issue.  Ukraine was a discrete problem, of no more than regional significance, amenable to a political settlement, not to be escalated.
But Europe finds itself now facing a potential confrontation so freighted with risk that NATO’s deputy military commander warned two weeks ago that “the threat from Russia, together with the risk it brings of miscalculation resulting in a slide into strategic conflict, however remote we see that as being right now, represents an obvious existential threat to our whole being…”
General Sir Adrian Bradshaw even laid out what the military see as Putin’s likeliest challenge:  “Russia might believe that the large-scale conventional forces she has shown she can generate at very short notice -- as we saw in the snap exercises that preceded the takeover of Crimea -- could in future not only be used for intimidation and coercion, but to seize NATO territory.”