In summer 2013, a bureaucratic EU project, backed up with little money and no hard power and executed in a technocratic, apolitical way, was enough to instill mortal fear in the Kremlin. Negotiations on an association and free-trade agreement between the EU and Ukraine had entered their final phase and were scheduled to culminate in a big summit in Vilnius in November.

Dutifully, Putin mustered the Kremlin’s classic arsenal. To set a precedent, he bullied a smaller country, Armenia, into joining his bogus alternative Eurasian project. He then applied the right mix of threats and embraces to convince Yanukovych that his political survival was best guaranteed by staying with Russia instead of joining the West.

Western observers have long interpreted such moves as the outflow of a Russian grand strategy to reestablish a neo-Soviet empire. Those closer to the Kremlin have sought to debunk such imperial talk as nonsense, but they have been largely ignored. It was much more convenient to nurture old Cold War stereotypes than to see through the Kremlin’s scheme. In reality, Putin’s strong-arming of weak neighbors was and is symptomatic of a desperate fight for the survival of a rotten and hollowed-out political system.