It has been quite a year for Vladimir Putin, and a mark of shame to the West and the institutions of international law it thought it had created.
In mid-2013, it became increasingly obvious that the Russian adventure in Georgia had neither been a one-off nor a taste of things to come. Putin had learned two things from 2008: The first, that he had essentially a free hand in non-NATO former Soviet states; and the second, that while his then-decrepit military could best any of his neighbors’, military doctrine and command structure had badly deteriorated along with training and materiel. He …read more
Source: CXSSR