We have goaded Russia into invading a country we had no intention of defending.
In the almost three months of what is now known as the Ukraine crisis, one unanswered question stands out – and it is not the one most people are asking. It is not why Vladimir Putin has behaved as he has – stationing large numbers of troops close to Ukraine’s borders, receiving a stream of foreign leaders at the Kremlin, staging a nuclear exercise to coincide with the annual gathering of the world’s security elite in Munich, and then suddenly ditching the diplomacy and recognising the two rebel regions of Ukraine, maybe reinforced by Russian troops as ‘peacekeepers’.
