Ukraine Again

 When the crisis in Ukraine started ramping up, I would begin every morning by checking News Today to see if Russia had invaded Ukraine while I was sleeping.  After a while it became increasingly hard to sustain that level of alarm and the project lost some urgency.

Well, I guess it is time to become anxious again. Russia has started large scale war games in neighboring Belarus.  The map makes clear why this is so alarming.  It greatly expands Ukraine's vulnerable border.  

The Russian government says the war games will continue for ten days (until February 20) and that the Russian troops with withdraw from Belarus at the end of that time.  Are such promises worth the paper they are printed on?  (Or the pixels the broadcast?)  Probably worth that much, but not much more.  If Putin decides to invade Ukraine, the wargames will make it trivially easy for him to manufacture a pretext and then say he had intended to withdraw but events forced his hand.  On the other hand, if he ends up deciding that discretion is the better part of valor, he can withdraw as promised without loss of face and even laugh at us for being so alarmist.

And if the Russians do withdraw from Belarus after February 20, the next question will be how much a reduction of tensions that is.