Excerpts from last week's WSJ:
In massing troops near Ukraine, Mr. Putin’s goal is to extract concessions from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and force him to give Russia a say in Ukraine’s future. That would send a message to other former Soviet states that the West can’t guarantee their security. To ratchet up the pressure, Mr. Putin has an array of military options short of a full occupation, from low-profile incursions to a limited conflict in the eastern Donbas region, where Russian-backed separatists have declared themselves independent of Ukraine but aren’t recognized by the government in Kyiv.
Mr. Putin has been clear about wishing to reassert Russia’s influence over its neighbors, particularly Ukraine. In 2014, he annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, fomenting an eight-year war in the country’s east.
So far, Mr. Putin has left Western leaders guessing about whether he would stage a major invasion of Ukraine and provoke a possible breakdown in ties with the West, or whether he would be satisfied with wringing a few concessions from an expansive list of demands he has put forth. These include that NATO guarantees that it won’t give membership to Ukraine.
Moscow has also demanded that NATO curb military exercises in Ukraine and other former Soviet nations, and that the alliance pull its forces back from its eastern member states. NATO deployed about 5,000 troops to Poland and the Baltic countries after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014.