By Peter Weber, The Week

What the U.S. can learn from the war

All Vladimir Putin wanted was to make Russia great again.

There are many reasons Putin decided to invade Ukraine, which historians and other experts will be sussing out for years. But it seems clear that the Russian leader pines for a time when his country — the heart of the late, not-so-great Soviet Union — was one of the most powerful on Earth. He has openly lamented its Cold War loss for years, and once famously pronounced the USSR’s demise as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” If nothing else, a quick military victory in Ukraine would prove that Russia is still a fearsome power.

That’s not working out so great.

While Russian bombs and missiles continue to rain down on Ukraine’s cities, inflicting a terrible slaughter on the civilians there, the fact is that we’re nearly a month into an invasion that many observers expected to take just a few days at most. The war appears to be stalemated, and Russia is suffering the consequences. Its economy has been shattered by Western sanctions and probably won’t recover for a very long time, and reports suggest that tens of thousands of young professionals are fleeing the country to work and live elsewhere, depriving it of crucial intellectual capital. Perhaps worst of all from Putin’s standpoint, Russia’s military has been revealed to be something of a paper tiger, scarier in theory than in practice.

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