PEPE ESCOBAR—Putin made it very clear that Russia’s legitimate strategic interests would have to be respected again. And that Russia was about to recover its de facto “veto rights” in managing world affairs. Well, the Putin doctrine was already being implemented since the Georgian affair in 2008.
Ukraine is a patchwork of morsels that belonged until recently to different empires – Austro-Hungarian and Russian – as well as several nations, such as Russia, Poland and Romania. It regroups Catholicism and Orthodoxy, and has millions of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers with deep historical, cultural and economic links with Russia. So Ukraine was a de facto new Yugoslavia.