Vladimir Putin is aggressive, increasingly armed, and dangerous. Besides his recent attack against Ukraine, he invaded Georgia in 2008 and has been rearming since well before then. Like his Communist and czarist predecessors, Putin seeks to expand Moscow’s control. Russian military spending—for example, on its impressive new nuclear attack submarine, the Severodvinsk, along with Moscow’s ambitious plans to rebuild its Pacific fleet—indicate that Putin does not regard the post-Communist contraction in imperial reach as permanent. 

He is also highly vulnerable. He is sustained by the export of oil and gas, whose revenue lines the pockets of his political base, Russia’s plutocracy.  But he needs foreign technology to extract and export energy, and he depends heavily on unchallenged control over the gas and oil markets to his main purchasers in Europe. Large oil and gas revenues and aggressiveness is a toxic brew. The invasion of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula this past weekend demonstrates again that Putin is moving deliberately to gather back what was lost when the Soviet empire imploded.