Putin is operating on his own timetable, and it may be a long one

“I expect we’ll have this crisis with us, in various forms, for all of 2022, at least,” said Andrei Sushentsov, dean of the school of international relations at MGIMO, the elite Moscow university run by the Russian Foreign Ministry.

He described the current standoff as only the first step in a drawn-out Russian effort to force the West to agree to a new security architecture for Eastern Europe. It was a characterization of the start of a more high-stakes phase in Russia’s yearslong conflict with the West that is gaining currency in Moscow’s foreign-policy circles.

Russia’s aim, according to Mr. Sushentsov: keep the threat of war ever-present, and thus compel negotiations that Western officials have avoided until now.

For too long, he said in an interview, people in Western Europe have been lulled into thinking that a new war on the continent was impossible. For Mr. Putin, that point of view needs to be changed, Mr. Sushentsov said, to compel the West to accept Russia’s demands.