Russian President Vladimir Putin made headlines around the world last week when he defended the 1939 Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact, by which Soviet leader Josef Stalin and German Chancellor Adolf Hitler agreed secretly to divide Eastern Europe between them. It was, Putin said, in line with the normal "methods of foreign policy" of the time.

"What is so bad about it, if the Soviet Union did not want to fight?" he asked.

Putin's language was harsher than when last he spoke publicly on the subject, at a 2009 commemoration of the outbreak of World War II, when he dismissed "all treaties" with the Nazis as "morally unacceptable" and "politically senseless." The reason for the shift in tone seems clear: Over the last year or so, relations between Moscow and the West have all but broken down and there is no mileage for Russia in accommodating Western sensibilities.