Immersed in the history of NATO enlargement, MarySarotte, historian professor at Johns Hopkins, sees Putin’s vision for himself: “He looks at Gorbachev as a bad negotiator, and then what Yeltsin let happen, & thinks, I can do better than these guys.” As a result, tens of millions of Ukrainians have become the unwitting hostages in Putin’s attempt to wrest a better deal -- calling on NATO to pull military infrastructure out of Eastern Europe, and on the U.S. to offer written guarantees that it will never support Ukraine’s accession to NATO: “He wants a do-over of 1997. After so many years in power, Putin sees himself, not Gorbachev or Yeltsin, as responsible for formulating the ultimate post-Soviet order! In this sense, many events or facts that may seem to be historically irreversible are, from his perspective, mistakes that remain to be corrected.”
At www.newyorker.com
