NYT: “The Russian leader may believe his moment has come to shift the balance of power in favor of the Kremlin, not only in Ukraine”

Photo: RIA Novosti

After three years of grinding warfare and isolation by the West, a world of new possibilities has opened up for Mr. Putin with a change of power in Washington, writes ‘The New York Times’.

Gone are the statements from the East Room of the White House about the United States standing up to bullies, supporting democracy over autocracy and ensuring freedom will prevail.

Gone, too, is Washington’s united front against Russia with its European allies, many of whom have begun to wonder if the new American administration will protect them against a revanchist Moscow, or even keep troops in Europe at all.

Mr. Trump, having voiced desires to take Greenland, has pursued a rapid rapprochement with the Kremlin, while sidelining shocked European allies and publicly assailing Zelensky.

Now, the Russian leader may believe his moment has come to shift the balance of power in favor of the Kremlin, not only in Ukraine.

“I think he sees real opportunity, both to win the war in Ukraine, effectively, but also to sideline the U.S. not just from Ukraine but from Europe,” said Max Bergmann, a Russia analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington who worked at the State Department during the Obama administration.

The Russian leader’s “grandiose objective,” Mr. Bergmann said, is the destruction of NATO, the 32-country military alliance led by the United States, which was established after World War II to protect Western Europe from the Soviet Union.

“I think that is right now all on the table,” Mr. Bergmann said.

The opening represents one of the biggest opportunities for Mr. Putin in his quarter-century in power in Russia.

For years, Mr. Putin has lamented the weakness Russia showed in the decade after the fall of the Soviet Union and has fixated on reversing the influence the United States has since gained in Europe at the Kremlin’s expense.

Three years ago Mr. Putin issued demands to the United States and its European allies that went far beyond Ukraine, proposing the resurrection of Cold War-style spheres of influence in a Europe divided between Moscow and Washington.

He demanded that NATO agree not to expand farther east to any nations of the former Soviet Union, including Ukraine. He also asked the United States and its Western European allies not to deploy any military forces or weaponry in the Central and Eastern European countries that once answered to Moscow.

Many of those nations, such as Estonia, Poland and Romania, have been NATO members for decades and would be difficult to defend against a Russian invasion without pre-positioned troops and equipment.

“In Putin’s view, it’s the most powerful countries that should get to determine the rules of the road,” said Angela Stent, emerita professor of government at Georgetown University. “Smaller countries, whether they like it or not, have to listen to them.”

Never mind, Ms. Stent said, that Russia lacks a superpower economy. “But it does have nuclear weapons, it has oil and gas and a veto on the U.N. Security Council,” she said. “It’s just power.”

At the time, the West immediately rejected Mr. Putin’s prewar proposals as unthinkable. The Russian leader is now almost certain to revive them in impending negotiations with Mr. Trump, a longtime skeptic of NATO and American troop presence in Europe. That has prompted a crisis among European allies, who are worried about what the U.S. president might concede.

“There is something very big going on at the moment,” said Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London. “This is not business as usual. This is a very different administration, and it’s very hard to see how trans-Atlantic relations will be the same at the end of this.”

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