re: Let's be clear about this: Russia is invading Ukraine right now

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He is playing the west like a fiddle to this point.

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That's not to argue that Western countries should have responded with more sanctions (even that took substantial cajoling from the US), but the point is that Putin shrewdly prevented it from happening by playing on the vulnerabilities of Western democracies: short attention spans, rapid war fatigue, and the often-unwise pull of popular opinion.

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