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As reports pile up about Russia’s military mobilisation on Ukraine’s border and the Kremlin’s diplomatic demands, questions abound. What is going on? What will come next? Will Russia invade?

In fact, Russian President Vladimir Putin is following an eight-year-old script.

In the northern autumn of 2013, Putin’s government launched a multifaceted offensive to prevent Ukraine, Moldova and Armenia from signing free-trade agreements with the European Union. That set off a gradually deepening crisis that would profoundly alter Ukraine’s domestic politics, Russia’s position in Europe and the future of NATO. Less than a year later, Russia annexed Crimea and embarked on a barely disguised effort to dismantle the rest of Ukraine. The Kremlin then launched two more incursions into eastern Ukraine to save the separatist statelets that it had managed to set up there.

Since then, 14,000 people have died in this low-level ‘frozen’ conflict. The EU and the US regularly renew their sanctions on Russia, and the United Nations General Assembly regularly condemns Russia’s behaviour and reaffirms the sanctity of state borders. Not only did Putin fail to derail the EU–Ukraine free-trade agreement; he also managed to transform Ukraine from a friendly neighbour into a country that regards Russia as dangerous and hostile. Invading other countries is a historically proven way to make lasting enemies.

Putin now faces the embarrassing prospect of being remembered as the Russian leader who lost Ukraine. He will have set his country back three centuries, to the time before Peter the Great. Even the collapse of the Soviet Union eventually may come to seem less important than Putin’s blunders over the past decade.

Nonetheless, Putin appears to have spent his Covid-19 isolation reading history. This summer, he produced a remarkable essay effectively calling for a greater Slavic empire. Suggesting that power over Ukraine and Belarus ultimately lies within the Kremlin’s walls, he made clear that he intends to recover what his previous miscalculations lost.

The subsequent evolution of Putin’s thinking is unknown. But it is plausible that he spotted weakness in the chaotic US exit from Afghanistan and surmised that America is not keen on yet another foreign entanglement. Whatever Putin’s reasoning, he has since abandoned further dialogue with Ukraine’s leaders, sent German and French mediators packing and concentrated a massive number of tanks in the border region. His goal is to pressure the US to agree to a series of radical demands for restructuring European security; chief among these is that the US rescind its promise, first made in 2008, that Ukraine will someday be invited to join NATO.

Putin’s strategic intent in 2014—to stop the agreement with the EU—ultimately failed. Now, his immediate focus is on regional security issues. Russian officials and state media have been issuing shrill warnings and spinning ominous tales about the US placing missiles in Ukraine to strike Moscow. There is talk of genocide against Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population, and of Ukraine’s imminent entry into NATO.

None of these claims bears the faintest resemblance to the truth. But opinion polls suggest that the propaganda has been effective. Around 39% of Russians believe that war is imminent, and this figure is likely to grow as the Kremlin continues to stoke fear among the population.

In the meantime, Putin has tasked his diplomats with securing US and EU agreement to his maximalist formal demands for a new security order. The manoeuvre is eerily reminiscent of the infamous deal-making done at Yalta in 1945, when the Allied powers discussed how Germany and Europe would be carved up after World War II.

Yet while a further expansion of NATO is not in the cards, the alliance will not accept an arrangement that denies any country the right to shape its own destiny. This issue is bigger than Ukraine. The president of Finland, whose country shares a long border with Russia, has been vocal in pointing out that the option of applying for NATO membership is key to Finnish security. Though he has no intention of launching a membership bid, he can’t allow any outside power to limit his country’s sovereignty. Likewise, countries across Central and Eastern Europe fear that giving in to one Kremlin demand will only invite more.

Is a diplomatic resolution still possible? The path is narrow, and time might be running out. There are proposals to place limits on, and improve the transparency of, conventional forces in Europe. But Russia has rejected many such proposals in the past, and complex arms negotiations would take considerable time. These diplomatic options would not satisfy Putin’s wish to create a ‘Greater Russia’, suggesting that the Kremlin will not rule out military options.

These come in many shapes and sizes. A full-scale Russian invasion would undoubtedly lead to an open-ended conflict that, whatever the original intention, is bound to spill over Ukraine’s borders. If that happened, all options would be on the table for NATO. Severe sanctions and other measures would further squeeze Russia’s already dim economic prospects—even if it secures support from China. More to the point, NATO would finally roar forward to Russia’s border by deepening its presence in its member states that border Russia.

Given this foreseeable outcome, an invasion would be folly in the extreme. But this scenario cannot be ruled out. The Kremlin’s record of profound mistakes in its policy towards Ukraine is long. And while many in Moscow already doubt the rationality of Putin’s aggressive revisionism, their voices carry no weight.

Another more imminent possibility is that the Kremlin will try to provoke Ukraine into doing something that would justify a smaller-scale invasion of the kind we saw in 2014 and 2015. But the escalation risk would be severe, and even a small invasion would expose Russia to severely damaging consequences. Either way, Putin has embarked on a dangerous path.

It is not too late to prevent Putin’s script from becoming a tragedy. Let us hope that he has not been reading Chekhov, who famously advised against introducing a gun in the first act unless it will be used in the second.

In recent months, Russia has positioned a large and capable military force along its border with Ukraine. What we do not know is why Russian President Vladimir Putin has done this (capabilities are always easier to gauge than intentions), or even if he has decided on a course of action. Thus far, Putin has created options, not outcomes.

What comes to mind is July 1990, when another autocrat, Saddam Hussein, positioned sizable military forces along Iraq’s southern border with Kuwait. Then, as now, intentions were murky but the imbalance of forces was obvious. Arab leaders told US President George H.W. Bush not to overreact, convinced it was a ploy to compel Kuwait to take steps to increase the price of oil, which would help Iraq recover and rearm after its long war with Iran.

By early August, though, what to many had looked like political theatre had become all too real. Invasion led to conquest, and it took a massive international coalition led by the US to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait and restore the country’s sovereignty.

Could a similar dynamic be playing out today on the Russia–Ukraine border?

US President Joe Biden’s administration has reacted to Russia’s troop buildup with a mix of honey and vinegar. The objective is to persuade Russia not to invade by making clear that the costs would outweigh any benefits and that some Russian concerns could be addressed, at least in part, if it backed off. Call it deterrence mixed with diplomacy.

Some have criticised the US response as too weak. But geography and military balance make direct defence of Ukraine all but impossible. Biden was right to take direct US military intervention off the table: not acting on such a threat would only reinforce mounting doubts as to America’s reliability.

But Biden is also right to push back against Russia. The US and the UK, along with Russia itself, provided assurances to Ukraine in 1994 that, in exchange for giving up the nuclear arsenal it had inherited from the Soviet Union, its sovereignty and borders would be respected. This did not constitute a NATO-like security commitment, but it did imply that Ukraine would not be abandoned.

And yet some who oppose direct resistance of Russian aggression against Ukraine support it in the case of possible Chinese aggression against Taiwan. In both instances, geography works against US military options, and in neither is the US bound by an ironclad security commitment. But in the case of Ukraine, NATO allies are not prepared to defend against a Russian attack and are not expecting the US to do so. By contrast, US allies and partners are prepared to resist Chinese aggression and expect that the US would help frustrate any Chinese bid for regional hegemony.

This does not mean Russia should have a free hand versus Ukraine. Whatever order does exist in the world is premised on the principle that no country is permitted to invade another and change borders by force. This more than justifies providing Ukraine with arms to defend itself, as well as threatening to impose severe economic sanctions that would exact a significant cost on Russia’s already fragile, energy-dependent economy.

Biden is also right to offer a diplomatic path for Putin if he decides it would be wiser to walk back from the brink. Several worthy ideas have been suggested: stepped-up US participation in the Minsk diplomatic process initiated in the wake of Russia’s intervention in eastern Ukraine in 2014, a mutual pull-back of Russian and Ukrainian forces from their shared border, and a willingness to discuss with Russia the architecture of European security.

The Biden administration is also right to limit what it offers to Putin. It is one thing not to bring Ukraine into NATO now; it would be quite another to rule it out permanently. The same holds for any assurances that might be extended to Russia about other NATO policies. Diplomacy should never be confused with capitulation.

At the end of the day, what comes next is Putin’s decision to make. He sees Ukraine as an organic part of greater Russia, and may well seek its incorporation to cement his legacy and reverse—at least partly—the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he described in 2005 as ‘a major geopolitical disaster of the century’. One hopes that a policy of raising the costs of invading and offering some face-saving gestures will convince Putin to defuse the crisis he has created.

If, however, deterrence fails and Putin does invade, promised sanctions will have to be introduced. That includes scrapping the Russia-to-Germany Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline and imposing real costs on Russian financial institutions and Putin’s inner circle. It would be a moment, too, to strengthen NATO and provide Ukraine with additional arms, advice and intelligence.

This brings me back to Iraq, but in 2003 and the following years. The US invaded out of a concern that Saddam was hiding weapons of mass destruction and because it saw an opportunity to spread democracy, not just to Iraq but throughout the Arab world. But while the war began with a massive ‘shock and awe’ air campaign and the rapid fall of Baghdad, consolidating military advances proved to be both difficult and costly as urban-based militant groups provided stiff opposition to US-led troops. The American people turned against the war and a foreign policy judged to be overly ambitious and enormously expensive.

A similar fate could await Russia should its troops march on Kyiv and try to control most or all of Ukraine. Here, too, consolidating control in the face of widespread, heavily armed resistance could prove extremely difficult. Large numbers of Russian soldiers would return home in body bags as they did from Afghanistan following the 1979 Soviet intervention. A decade later, Soviet troops were gone from that country, as were the Soviet leaders associated with the invasion. The Soviet Union itself disintegrated. Putin would be wise to reckon with the lessons of this past before deciding on the future.

During the four decades of the Cold War, the United States had a grand strategy focused on containing the power of the Soviet Union. Yet by the 1990s, following the Soviet Union’s collapse, America had been deprived of that pole star. After the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, US President George W. Bush’s administration tried to fill the void with a strategy that it called a ‘global war on terror’. But that approach provided nebulous guidance and led to long US-led wars in marginal places like Afghanistan and Iraq. Since 2017, the US has returned to ‘great-power competition’, this time with China.

As a grand US strategy, great-power competition has the advantage of focusing on major threats to America’s security, economy and values. While terrorism is a continuing problem that the US must treat seriously, it poses a lesser threat than rival great powers. Terrorism is like jujitsu, in which a weak adversary turns the power of a larger player against itself. While the 9/11 attacks killed more than 2,600 Americans, the ‘endless wars’ that the US launched in response to them cost even more lives, as well as trillions of dollars. While Barack Obama’s administration tried to pivot to Asia—the fastest growing part of the world economy—the legacy of the global war on terror kept the US mired in the Middle East.

A strategy of great-power competition can help America refocus; but it has two problems. First, it lumps together very different types of states. Russia is a declining power and China a rising one. The US must appreciate the unique nature of the threat that Russia poses. As the world sadly discovered in 1914, on the eve of World War I, a declining power (Austria-Hungary) can sometimes be the most risk-acceptant in a conflict. Today, Russia is in demographic and economic decline but retains enormous resources that it can employ as a spoiler in everything from nuclear-arms control and cyber conflict to the Middle East. The US therefore needs a Russia strategy that doesn’t throw that country into China’s arms.

A second problem is that the concept of great-power rivalry provides an insufficient alert to a new type of threat we face. National security and the global political agenda have changed since 1914 and 1945, but US strategy currently underappreciates new threats from ecological globalisation. Global climate change will cost trillions of dollars and may cause damage on the scale of war; the Covid-19 pandemic has already killed more Americans than all the country’s wars, combined, since 1945.

Yet, the current US strategy results in a Pentagon budget that is more than 100 times that of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and 25 times that of the National Institutes of Health. Former US Treasury secretary Lawrence H. Summers and other economists recently called for the establishment of a US$10 billion annual global health threats fund, which is ‘miniscule compared to the $10 trillion that governments have already incurred in the COVID-19 crisis’.

Meanwhile, US policymakers are debating how to deal with China. Some politicians and analysts call the current situation a ‘new cold war’, but squeezing China into this ideological framework misrepresents the real strategic challenge America faces. The US and the Soviet Union had little bilateral commerce or social contact, whereas America and its allies trade heavily with China and admit several hundred thousand Chinese students to their universities. Chinese President Xi Jinping is no Stalin, and the Chinese system is not Marxist–Leninist but ‘market Leninist’—a form of state capitalism based on a hybrid of public and private firms subservient to an authoritarian party elite.

In addition, China is now the largest trade partner to more countries than the US is. America can decouple security risks like Huawei from its 5G telecommunications network, but trying to curtail all trade with China would be too costly. And even if breaking apart economic interdependence were possible, we can’t decouple the ecological interdependence that obeys the laws of biology and physics, not politics.

Since America can’t tackle climate change or pandemics by itself, it has to realise that some forms of power must be exercised with others. Addressing these global problems will require the US to work with China at the same time that it competes with the Chinese navy to defend freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. If China links the issues and refuses to cooperate, it will hurt itself.

A good great-power competition strategy requires careful net assessment. Underestimation breeds complacency, while overestimation creates fear. Either can lead to miscalculation.

China is the world’s second-largest economy and its GDP (at market exchange rates) may surpass that of the US by the 2030s. But even if it does, China’s per capita income remains less than a quarter that of the US, and the country faces a number of economic, demographic and political problems. Its economic growth rate is slowing, the size of its labour force peaked in 2011, and it has few political allies. If the US, Japan and Europe coordinate their policies, they will still represent the largest part of the global economy and will have the capacity to organise a rules-based international order capable of shaping Chinese behaviour. That alliance is at the heart of a strategy to manage China’s rise.

As former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd argues, the objective for great-power competition with China is not total victory over an existential threat, but rather ‘managed strategic competition’. That will require America and its allies to avoid demonising China. They should instead see the relationship as a ‘cooperative rivalry’ that requires equal attention to both sides of the description at the same time. On those terms, we can cope successfully, but only if we realise that this is not the great-power competition of the 20th century.

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has once again demonstrated the lengths to which he will go to crack down on his opponents. On 23 May, he deployed a MiG-29 fighter jet to force down a commercial flight, which was traveling from Athens to Vilnius, shortly before it left Belarusian airspace. The purpose was to apprehend Roman Protasevich, the former editor-in-chief of the Belarusian opposition publication and social-media channel Nexta, who was arrested after the plane landed in Minsk.

Why a regime that is already under US and EU sanctions would go so far as to hijack a plane travelling from one EU member state to another is not hard to fathom. Nexta is Lukashenko’s public enemy number one. More than just a news portal with millions of followers across multiple social-media platforms (especially Telegram), Nexta has been the single most important conduit for information in Belarus since the country’s fraudulent presidential election last August.

In addition to reporting on Belarusian security forces’ violent crackdown against peaceful demonstrators, Nexta had provided daily instructions on when, where and how Belarusians should mobilise during last year’s countrywide mass protests against Lukashenko’s bogus election victory. Its Sunday calls for a national march for freedom brought as many as 200,000 people into the streets of Minsk. And all of these demonstrators knew precisely what to do, because they were following the playbook published by Protasevich and his colleague, Nexta founder Stepan Putilo.

Following this unprecedented uprising, Lukashenko’s regime panicked, and for good reason. Nexta was collecting and sharing information and photos from all over Belarus. Every message, photo and call to action that it published went viral, reaching people across the country and around the world.

The key to Nexta’s power was that it based itself outside of Belarus, in Warsaw. The Lukashenko regime could neither turn off its internet connection nor imprison or shoot it, as it was doing with opposition outlets and protesters still in Belarus. Lukashenko was doubtless infuriated by the fact that the protests were being guided not so much by Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the likely winner of the August election, but by an elusive new-media operator beyond Belarus’s borders.

Since the release in March of a Nexta documentary exposing Lukashenko’s ill-gotten riches (similar to a recent viral film about Russian President Vladimir Putin published by the now-imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny), Lukashenko has been prepared to move heaven and earth to take down his 20-something bêtes noires. In his mind, Nexta is the keystone buttressing all of the various fronts of the resistance.

Because the Ryanair flight Protasevich was on was much closer to Vilnius than to Minsk, the Lukashenko regime’s claim that a bomb threat necessitated an emergency landing in the Belarusian capital is not credible. Once it was on the ground in Minsk, they made a fleeting show of searching passengers and their luggage before quickly apprehending the young dissident and his girlfriend.

The detention of Protasevich’s girlfriend is a classic method of the KGB (as the Belarusian security service is still called), particularly when the intent is to extract confessions. Protasevich is an extremely valuable catch for Lukashenko, because (the dictator assumes) he has the contacts of virtually all of Belarus’s activists. The day after seizing Protasevich, the regime released a video of him admitting to his past participation in the protests.

The same tactic has also been used on Tikhanovskaya, whose husband was already in prison. When she was abducted after the first August protests in Minsk, she was forced to record a speech calling for an end to the uprising, most likely after having seen her husband being threatened with torture. She has since been expelled from the country, and because everyone in Belarus is familiar with these methods, no one blames her for remaining largely on the sidelines.

The hijacking is meant to send a message. To the opposition, Lukashenko wants to say, ‘Your days are numbered. You are traitors, and we kill traitors.’ And to the EU, he has issued a direct challenge: ‘We can make fools of you whenever it suits us, and you will not hurt us, because you are weak.’

Such conclusions are not unwarranted. After all, the Kremlin, whose domestic supporters gloated about the hijacking and Protasevich’s arrest, poisoned Navalny with a nerve agent and paid almost no price for it. The US, UK, EU and others expressed concern and imposed symbolic sanctions, and Russia responded by putting Navalny in a labour camp.

When the Czech Republic revealed last month that Russia had been behind explosions at a weapons depot that killed two Czechs in 2014, the reaction was much the same. In fact, US President Joe Biden’s administration has just waived sanctions against a company building the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline between Russia and Germany. Clearly it’s money, not principles, that matter.

Lukashenko is following Russia’s example. The Kremlin has long gloried in embarrassing foreign security services that try to protect opposition figures, usually by attacking exiled dissidents right under their noses, as with the March 2018 attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal in the English city of Salisbury.

Protasevich had received political asylum in Lithuania. Given that Nexta is based in Poland, it’s worth asking if the Polish authorities did everything they could—or anything at all—to protect and warn him and his colleagues against the dangers they faced. It should have been clear that Protasevich and Putilo were in danger. It’s well known that Russia and Belarus will target those they consider traitors, even when they’re abroad. Now it’s well known how far they will go for that purpose.