Opinion, Volodymyr Zelensky, Vladimir Putin, Ukraine, War

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Anne Applebaum: The reason Putin would risk war.

February 5, 2022 3:49 AM 1 min read

Anne Applebaum

Soldiers practice during urban warfare drills on Dec. 26, 2021 in Kyiv. (Kyiv’s 130th Territorial Defense Brigade)

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There are questions about troop numbers, questions about diplomacy. There are questions about the Ukrainian military, its weapons, and its soldiers. There are questions about Germany and France: How will they react? There are questions about America, and how it has come to be a central player in a conflict not of its making. But of all the questions that repeatedly arise about a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine, the one that gets the least satisfactory answers is this one: Why?

Continue reading on The Atlantic.

Editor’s Note: This op-ed was published by The Atlantic. The Kyiv Independent is aggregating it as a recommendation to our readers.

Anne Applebaum

Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic, a fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.Read more

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