There’s not a nation on Earth that works as hard to ensure its perception of invulnerability as Russia does. Russia projects a narrative that its ascendancy is inevitable, while the reality is the opposite. You never see Russia panic publicly, but the signs that they are under tremendous stress can be seen everywhere if you look even just a little underneath the facade.

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Power in Russia today is concentrated in a personalized, centralized, highly vertical power structure dominated by Putin and a narrow circle of security-service and loyalist elites who control political appointments, major economic assets, and coercive instruments of the State. This is essentially unchanged from Soviet days, except previously we called them communists, while today Russia is effectively a dictatorship with democratic embellishments.

Russia’s national policy has always been expansionist. Russian leaders for centuries have believed that this policy advances Russia’s national interest. Because it views its existence as dependent on growth, it believes any efforts to stifle that growth threaten its existence. For Putin, whose vision is of an expansive Russian empire that has no territorial limitations, the world is his enemy.

Going into this battle, Russia has one distinct strength, which is its nuclear power. It maintains a nuclear triad roughly equal in size to the American arsenal. Russia has heavily leveraged that truth by regularly threatening the probability that, if deterred from its........

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