I Played Putin in a War Game. The Most Dangerous Period May Be Coming.

Mr. Gabuev is the director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. He wrote from Berlin.

It was a bitter victory. After occupying a chunk of NATO territory in the Baltics, my team successfully converted the land grab into a diplomatic coup, winning major concessions from the United States that would refashion Europe’s security architecture in Russia’s favor. I was President Vladimir Putin, and I had just secured a big win for my project of Russian aggrandizement.

Thankfully, this was not reality. It was a war game organized by the German newspaper Die Welt and the German armed forces, designed........

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