Playing to Putin’s End Game

This week's ethnic Russian demonstrations in Eastern Ukraine, fistfights in the Ukrainian parliament, and the image of a country unraveling are all too predictable. They are right out of Putin’s Crimea playbook from a month ago. And just as in Crimea, we shouldn’t believe anything Moscow says about what it is doing. Putin aims to destabilize the heavily Russian-speaking eastern part of Ukraine to weaken confidence in the Kiev government and argue that Russia alone can bring about order.