Understanding Russia’s actions in Ukraine: The art of improvisation

Understanding Russia in the current crisis calls for a combination of three frames: one that sees Russia’s actions as defensive ones, another one that sees them grounded in geopolitics and great-power thinking, and a third one that takes them as an open-ended process with little predictability. The key is trying to understand how forethought and improvisation interact, and the analysis of this interaction may tell us what to expect in the future and how to prepare for it.

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