Vladimir Putin knows when he and Russia are not wanted. He also knows where he and Russia are wanted—in Asia and the Middle East. From Ted Snider at antiwar.com:
The horrific war in Ukraine is, tragically, far from over with no end in sight. Whether the world that emerges will be unipolar or multipolar, one thing is certain: the world is now more polarized.
The war in Ukraine is a threshold that, having been crossed, forces Russia to face two certain premises. The first is that the West will not take into consideration Russia’s security concerns. For that reason, for the foreseeable future, Russia will turn away from the West in a stance of hostility and defensiveness. The second is that Russia will no longer trust the West or trust being integrated into the Western system. For that reason, Russia will turn toward the East and reinforce its relationships with China, India and other non-European nations who are unaligned with the US or who line up with a multipolar world not locked to American hegemony.
The previous Russian foreign policy approach of persuading the West to take seriously Russia’s security concerns is over. This hope has been killed by empirical reality. NATO’s decades long march toward Russia’s borders finally pulled the life support from that hope when it refused to make the commitment not to cross Russia’s red line into Ukraine. Its threatened 800 mile expansion along the Finnish border and its announced opening of a permanent military headquarters in Poland in violation of the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act demonstrate its future intentions. Putin’s spurned December 2021 request for negotiations and Russia’s accompanying proposal on mutual security guarantees likely represents the last effort by Russia in the foreseeable future to preserve friendly relations with the West by attempting to negotiate the acceptance of Russia’s security concerns.
