A week of meetings lies ahead – and the wisdom of them largely comes down to whether you judge Russia to be driven by insecurity or expansionism
So high have the stakes been set by Russia over the future security architecture of Europe, and so imminent is the threat of war in Ukraine, that the three separate meetings arranged between Russia and the west this week are drawing comparison with some of the great western-Russian exchanges of the past, from Yalta in 1945 to Paris in 1960, over the future of Berlin, and Reykjavik in 1986.
Vladimir Putin, with his keen sense of his place in Russian history, would probably revel in these comparisons. Indeed, the very scheduling of the three meetings – a bilateral security meeting with the US on Monday, a rare meeting of the Nato-Russian Council on Wednesday and an Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) meeting on Ukraine on Thursday – is seen by some as a mistake.
