- The Cold War began shortly after the end of World War II. The far left likes the talk of fighting American hegemony. Ukrainian military intelligence reckons there may be 9,000 in their country (NATO has given no estimate). A tentative agreement has been reached to withdraw heavy weaponry.But Russia looks sure to be able to keep open its border with Ukraine and sustain the flow of arms and people. The Politburo suffered from no feelings of inferiority. "Relations between the Soviet Union and the United States were driven by a complex interplay of ideological, political, and economic factors, which led to shifts between cautious cooperation and often bitter superpower rivalry over the years. Alexander Borodai, the first “prime minister” of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, who fought with anti-Yeltsin forces, hails Mr Putin as the leader of the nationalist movement in Russia today.Yet for a few years after Mr Putin came to power he built close relations with NATO. Spending on defence and security is expected to climb by 30% this year and swallow more than a third of the federal budget.As well as money for combat aircraft, helicopters, armoured vehicles and air-defence systems, about a third of the budget has been earmarked to overhaul Russia’s nuclear forces. That may reflect growing confidence in Russia’s conventional forces.
More than 150 were by the alliance’s beefed-up Baltic air-policing mission—four times as many as in 2013. Nearly all its large-scale military exercises in the past decade have featured simulations of limited nuclear strikes, including one on Warsaw.Mr Putin has also been streamlining his armed forces, with the army recruiting 60,000 contract soldiers each year. Mr Kiselev puts it even more bluntly: “During the years of romanticism [ie, detente], the Soviet Union undertook not to use nuclear weapons first. Once Mr Yanukovych had gone, American envoys offered Ukraine’s interim government $25 billion to place missile defences on the Russian border, in order to shift the balance of nuclear power towards America. Its stance on homosexuality and promotion of “traditional” moral values appeal to religious conservatives.
Particularly at risk are the Baltic states—Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania—two of which have large Russian-speaking minorities.
A combination of instruments, some military and some non-military, choreographed to surprise, confuse and wear down an opponent, hybrid warfare is ambiguous in both source and intent, making it hard for multinational bodies such as NATO and the EU to craft a response. The Soviet Union, which had fought alongside the U.S during the war, represented a serious threat to the American supremacy on a global scale.
And it would end Ukraine’s hopes of ever regaining sovereignty over its territory other than on Russian terms, which would undoubtedly include staying out of the EU and NATO. The point is not so much to promote the Kremlin’s views, but to denigrate opposition figures, and foreign governments and institutions, and to sow fear and confusion. Russia is holding military exercises on its side of the border. Click on the links to find out about the events. This is not a conflict that could have been resolved in Minsk.This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline "From cold war to hot war"Sign up to our free daily newsletter, The Economist todayCovid-19 has forced a radical shift in working habitsCovid-19 and an atmosphere of distrust pose grave risks to America’s electionThe uprising in Belarus and the poisoning of Alexei Navalny Wielding power or gaining influence abroad—through antiestablishment political parties, disgruntled minority groups, media outlets, environmental activists, supporters in business, propagandist “think-tanks”, and others—has become part of the Kremlin’s hybrid-war strategy. Crimea was not even mentioned.Meanwhile the IMF has said it will lend Ukraine $17.5 billion to prop up its economy. Russia had no choice but to act.Even without Ukraine, Mr Putin has said, America would have found some other excuse to contain Russia. The Cold War was a period of geopolitical tension between the Soviet Union and the United States and their respective allies, the Eastern Bloc and the Western Bloc, after World War II. Russia “has invested heavily in defence,” says NATO’s new secretary-general, a former Norwegian prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg. What Russia wants From cold war to hot war. “This pattern of behaviour can be used to hide intent,” says General Philip Breedlove, NATO’s most senior commander. After the war, they became enemies. “What is it masking? Though European opposition means it has now been scrapped, the episode shows the methods Moscow uses to protect its economic interests.In all this Mr Putin is evidently acting not only for Russia’s sake, but for his own. It sees them as “occupied” by America, which seeks to exploit Western values to gain influence over the rest of the world. Russia’s aggression in Ukraine is part of a broader, and more dangerous, confrontation with the West
Latvia recorded more than 150 incidents of Russian planes entering its airspace.There have also been at least two near-misses between Russian military aircraft and Swedish airliners. Even during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, Soviet leaders were constrained by the Politburo and memories of the second world war. Destabilising Ukraine is not enough to counter that force: the magnet itself must be neutralised.Russia feels threatened not by any individual European state, but by the European Union and NATO, which it regards as expansionist. Historians do not fully agree on the dates, but the period is generally considered to span the 1947 Truman Doctrine to the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union.