Putin Played a Long Game. It’s Starting to Pay Off.

More than a decade before Russia’s armed forces poured over the border into Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin stood before world leaders and delivered a long, icy speech demanding a radical overhaul of the world order.

“We have reached that decisive moment when we must seriously think about the architecture of global security,” Putin said in the 2007 speech in Munich, accusing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization of breaking a promise by expanding into Eastern Europe and calling for an end to U.S. hegemony.