Many experts doubted that Putin would go that far. Instead, he may have simply sent Russian troops to completely occupy Donbass, Ukraine’s eastern province that included the separatist Russian puppet “states” of Donetsk and Luhansk. NATO’s reaction would have been lukewarm and Russia would have emerged with a forged victory: the dismemberment of Ukraine and the deepening of divisions within NATO over the gravity of the Russian threat.
Instead, Putin pushed all his chips in the middle. . .