(Politico) Is Vladimir Putin having his Brezhnev moment? President Obama’s critics have made the Russian leader’s invasion of Crimea out to be a stroke of geopolitical genius, a move that has exposed America’s weakness and shown the Kremlin to be stealing a march on the once-mighty United States. “Putin is playing chess and I think we are playing marbles,” says House intel chairman Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.). “Obama needs to convince Putin that he will not be outfoxed,” writes Ed Luce in the Financial Times. “If this were a tennis match, it would be the umpire shouting, ‘Advantage Putin!’” says Rand Paul. “He seems to be running circles around this administration.”
But Putin’s gambit was much more impulsive than these detractors imagine, a recent story in the New York Times reveals. The article, by Steven Lee Myers, says a lot about Putin’s remarkably insular and centralized decision-making. The decision to invade Crimea was taken very rashly on either Feb. 25 or 26 with the core Russian war counsel consisting of four people including Putin, his chief of staff Sergei Ivanov, secretary of the security council Nikolai Patrushev, and Aleksandr Bortnikov, the director of the FSB, the modern-day successor to the KGB. All, like Putin himself, are hard-boiled veterans of the Soviet security state—and are committed to some form of its restoration. […]
