Stephen Walt thinks so:
First, he has put the idea of a further NATO expansion on the back burner for a long time, and maybe forever. Russia has opposed NATO’s march eastward ever since it began in the mid-1990s, but Russia was not in a position to do much about it. The brief 2008 war between Russia and Georgia was Putin’s first attempt to draw a red line, and that minor skirmish dampened enthusiasm for expansion considerably. This time around, Putin made it abundantly clear that any future attempt to bring Ukraine into NATO or even into EU membership will be met with firm Russian opposition and will probably lead to dismemberment of the country.
Second, Putin has restored Russian control over Crimea, an act that was popular with most Crimean residents and most Russians as well. The takeover entailed some short-term costs (including some rather mild economic sanctions), but it also solidified Russian control over its naval base in Sevastopol and will allow Russia to claim oil and gas reserves in the Black Sea that may be worth trillions of dollars. … Third, Putin has reminded Ukraine’s leaders that he has many ways to make their lives difficult. No matter what their own inclinations may be, it is therefore in their interest to maintain at least a cordial relationship with Moscow. And Ukraine’s new president, Petro Poroshenko, got the message.
Posner also disputes the theory, advanced by Tom Friedman, that Putin “blinked” after weighing the costs of the Ukrainian adventure against the benefits for his regime:
Russia’s economy was not weakened–the stock market was trading in the 1400s before the crisis and is trading in the 1400s today. The ruble is roughly unchanged, a hair lower. No
one really knows whether China got a bargain or not; too much depends on unknown contingencies. But it is clear that Russia has benefited from closer relations with China. NATO hardly seems revived, the European countries are in turmoil and divided in their response to Russia, and as dependent on its gas as ever. Defense spending is not likely to increase, but even if it did, Russia would hardly care since it has no plans to invade Poland or Germany, and knows that they have no plans to liberate Crimea or provide military aid to Ukraine.
Against these trivial costs if that is what they are, consider Russia’s gains. … Saying that Putin “blinked” is like saying that the boy who stole a cookie from a cookie jar blinked because he took only one cookie rather than all of them.
Meanwhile, the conflict itself continues apace, and Russian involvement has by no means ended. Anna Nemtsova reports that the rebels in eastern Ukraine have taken over a border town, opening a supply corridor with Russia:
What this means is that even as Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with senior European leaders on Thursday and he and U.S. President Barack Obama circle each other warily during the D-Day commemoration in Normandy on Friday, the war in eastern Ukraine may be moving into high gear. Although Putin has withdrawn most of the Russian troops that had been poised on the frontier threatening a conventional invasion, the way is now open for volunteers and operatives of various stripes, along with supplies, to move freely into the country.
A couple of journalistic colleagues and I had been hearing about attempts to open this corridor for several days as we traveled in eastern Ukraine. The Russian ministry of foreign affairs, Russian parliament parliamentarians and the Russian volunteers in Ukraine we spoke to all talked about establishing what they called a “humanitarian corridor.” We had been looking for the hole in the border, and we discovered it Wednesday near a city called Sverdlovsk in the region of Luhansk.
(Photo: Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images)
The Dish 