While they may be taking heavier casualties than Russian President Vladimir Putin expected, wresting Russian forces from Ukrainian territory will be difficult so long as Putin remains alive. Putin has centralized Russia to such an extent that chaos will likely fill the vacuum when he passes.

Putin certainly wants to reconstitute the Soviet Union, if not its broader sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. For analysts who ask why Ukraine and why now, two factors drive Putin’s timing. The first is fear of democracy on Russia’s borders. There is a logical flaw among those who say that Russians are culturally averse to democracy and also that Putin understands the Russian psyche: If the latter is true, then Putin’s hypersensitivity to “people power” revolutions in neighboring states shows the former is not.