After the Ukraine invasion, these same leaders effectively came to believe that they had only two choices: appeasement or confrontation. Before, those leaders were willing to tolerate his aggressions, partly out of a fear of how much worse things could get. They were sufficiently shocking as to change the way many Western leaders thought about their approach to Putin. The images coming from Ukraine were much more salient. presidential election was certainly aggressive, but it was also amorphous: Nobody could be sure exactly how much it mattered, and the Trump administration had an obvious incentive to downplay it. His previous attacks on Ukraine and Georgia were not full-scale wars. Putin’s earlier aggressions had been on a smaller scale. Russia was bombing cities and killing civilians, and millions of Ukrainians were fleeing their homes. Europe’s largest war in more than 75 years - since Nazi Germany surrendered - was underway. The start of fighting changed the West’s calculations in another way, too.
