Has Russia’s President Vladimir Putin finally overplayed his hand by challenging NATO?
It’s too soon to know, but some signs are emerging that the U.S. and Europe may be ready to apply the kind of sustained pressure needed to persuade him he has — and that his own interests would lie in ending the war in Ukraine.
The first indication is that Donald Trump, after a disturbing display of nonchalance last week when Russia fired drones into Poland, has set the terms under which he says he’d ramp up sanctions on Moscow. The second is that the European Commission appears, at last, to have backed a plan to fully use Russia’s frozen central bank assets — worth about $330 billion — against it.
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