Why Vladimir Putin Is Threatening Wider War with the West

By Carol J Williams

As Russian President Vladimir Putin defiantly grinds through a third year of his unprovoked war in Ukraine, two perplexing questions increasingly come to mind:

How is the Russian economy surviving international sanctions, high inflation, labor shortages caused by hundreds of thousands of men at war or abroad evading conscription and soaring military spending of $122 billion this year alone?

And, given the rising cost and toll of dead and seriously injured, estimated by British military intelligence to be 500,000, why is Putin trying to provoke a wider conflict with provocations against NATO-allied neighbors and the United States?

The economic question can be answered by the fact that war has been unifying for Putin’s country. Russians have been nurtured by 20 years of state propaganda to see the Ukraine war as an existential battle to defeat Western encroachment into former Soviet territory that Putin insists should now be part of Russia.

https://www.postalley.org/2024/06/09/why-vladimir-putin-is-threatening-wider-war-with-the-west/