Never interrrupt your enemy .....

"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake"
                                                                Napoleon Bonaparte

This advice seems appropriate today with respect to Putin's recent moves in the Ukraine.  The last thing he wants is a stronger, western-oriented NATO on his boarders. Yet that is precisely what his actions in the Ukraine are bringing about.  All the old Soviet colonial states on Russian's border are looking at this military incursion and thinking that they had better get closer to the West if they want to avoid a similar fate sometime in the future.

It is a little hard to see why Putin himself can't see that he is defeating his own long-term objectives, but then he is constrained by the mythologies of his own world view just as we Americans are constrained by our own mythologies.