Thomas Friedman: “To be sure, Ukraine’s democracy is frail and the country has had its own serious issues with oligarchs and corruption. Kyiv’s burning aspiration, though, was not to join NATO but to join the European Union, and it was in the process of cleaning itself up to do just that.”
“That’s what really triggered this war. Putin was never going to let a Slavic Ukraine become a successful free-market democracy in the E.U. next door to his stagnating Slavic Russian kleptocracy. The contrast would have been intolerable for him, and that is why he is trying to erase Ukraine.”
“But Putin, it turns out, had no clue what world he was living in, no clue about the frailties of his own system, no clue how much the whole free, democratic world could and would join the fight against him in Ukraine, and no clue, most of all, about how many people would be watching.”
