US authorities are perplexed by Putin's Ukraine conundrum
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Vladimir Putin has done it again again. He’s whipped up a frenzy in Washington. Everyone has an idea about what the Russian president has in store for Ukraine. But no one is certain. Perhaps he doesn’t believe it himself.

While Americans worry about soaring prices and everyday interruptions from the virus, Putin has once again pushed a nation that many American foreign policy elites regard as a creaky powerhouse in an irreversible decline to take center stage in the US capital.

Russia is on everyone’s lips in Washington, just as it was in 2016, when Putin built a political hall of mirrors in the United States, distorting reality and truth with an election meddling operation that is still causing strife and tearing the country apart.
Foreign policy has gone full circle for President Joe Biden. He came to Washington during the profound cold of the Cold War. Half a century later, he finds himself at odds with a Russian counterpart who never considered the superpower conflict to be over.

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Their spat over Ukraine may appear to be an obscure battle of wills. However, Putin is holding the sovereign democracy that was formerly part of the Soviet Union hostage in order to persuade Biden to agree to withdraw NATO forces from Moscow’s former orbit in eastern Europe. Their duel is about whether people can choose their own leaders and political systems, whether big nations can get away with invading smaller companies; whether democracy and international rules can prevail; and whether market economies can function freely or must exist under the heavy hand of the state or oligarchs.

Putin has received fawning attention in the US conservative media, which would have been inconceivable for any Soviet leader. And tensions over Russia boiled over into a spat Thursday between the State Department and its press corps, which was curiously accused of finding consolation in Russian propaganda.

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