Illustration by Tom Bachtell

Annexation has an ugly sound, owing to an unhappy past. The term describes, among other tragedies, Saddam Hussein’s attempt, in 1990, to swallow Kuwait whole, as the nineteenth province of Iraq; Indonesia’s invasion, in 1975, of East Timor; Morocco’s absorption, the same year, of Western Sahara; and Israel’s declaration, after the 1967 war, of East Jerusalem as part of a united capital. The German word for it is Anschluss. Like most coerced unions, annexations come wreathed in clouds of lofty, dishonest language—key themes are popular will, historic grievance, divine providence—but they almost always happen at the end of a gun.

Vladimir Putin’s speech at the Kremlin last week, asking a compliant Duma to ratify Crimea’s self-declared status as a new Russian republic, was a memorable example of annexation rhetoric. Putin opened with the baptism of Prince Vladimir in ancient Khersones, railed against years of humiliation by the West, warned of consequences for unnamed “national traitors” inside Russia, and moved the audience to tears on behalf of his people’s hearts and minds, where “Crimea has always been an inseparable part of Russia.” A few of his points had merit: it’s true that the United States, like other great powers, ignores international laws when they get in the way, and it should have been foreseeable that Russia would view the expansion of NATO as a challenge to its interests. Other parts of the speech were blatant falsehoods—for example, the charge that Russian-speaking Ukrainians were under threat from hordes of neo-Nazis, and the claim that “Russia’s armed forces never entered Crimea.” When Putin thanked his Ukrainian brothers for refraining from shedding blood, he neglected to mention that they had been disarmed by Russian special-forces troops.

The annexation of Crimea is now what Putin calls “an accomplished fact.” It won’t be undone for a long time, if ever. The referendum was illegal under Ukrainian and international law and was held in far from free circumstances, but the result probably reflected the majority will. More to the point, the U.S. and Europe won’t risk the effort to reverse the annexation, because they have minimal interests in Crimea, while Russia, with great interests, will risk almost anything to keep it. But the fate of the rest of Ukraine and of the other former Soviet republics, along with the future of relations between Russia and the West, remains very much unresolved. Any American policy needs to begin with an understanding of what the crisis is and what it isn’t.

Ukraine is not Czechoslovakia. For some American hawks, the year is always 1938, and Munich and appeasement are routinely invoked whenever there’s an act of aggression anywhere in the world. John McCain and Hillary Clinton both pointed to the superficial analogy between Crimea and the Sudetenland—annexation in the name of ethnic reunification. Before the referendum, pro-Ukrainian protesters in Kiev held up signs depicting Putin with Hitler’s black bangs and toothbrush mustache. All this inflates Putin’s importance far beyond his deserts. He may want Russia to lead a new Eurasian Union, but he doesn’t dream of world conquest; Russia has plenty of nuclear weapons, but its conventional military forces are ill prepared for a long occupation of Ukraine.

Nor is the crisis a revival of the Cold War—a comparison drawn both on the right, by McCain, in a Times Op-Ed, and on the left, by Stephen F. Cohen, in The Nation. That conflict divided the world into two camps, in a titanic struggle of ideas, with countless hot wars fought by proxies of the superpowers. The messy Ukraine crisis is what the world looks like when it’s not divided into two spheres of control. Putin stands for the opposite of a universal ideology; he has become an arch-nationalist of a pre-Cold War type, making mystic appeals to motherland and religion. He loves to challenge the supposed bullying of the West, but he does so with scarcely any support beyond Russia and the twenty million Russian speakers who live in former Soviet republics. He was warmly congratulated after the annexation by his friend Bashar al-Assad, of Syria, but a United Nations resolution condemning Russia’s actions won the approval of every Security Council member except China, which abstained (perhaps thinking of its own separatists in Tibet), and Russia itself.

It’s essential for the U.S. and Europe to prevent Putin from going farther and reversing the hard-won independence of former Soviet republics. Moscow is actively trying to destabilize cities in eastern Ukraine, following the familiar strategy of whipping up fear and chauvinism among Russian speakers. The Western countries should use all the non-military tools at their disposal—money, diplomacy, political support, trade inducements that build on the political accord signed last Friday, poll monitors—to insure that Ukraine doesn’t collapse into chaos before the Presidential elections on May 25th, and that the vote is fair. Ukrainian leaders are wisely making space for pro-Russia politics and promising a degree of federalism under a new government. Ukrainians shouldn’t feel compelled to choose, for the sake of safety and identity, between Russia and the West—that’s what Putin wants.

A successful election in a stable Ukraine is half the battle against Putin’s aggression. The other half is deterrence. It would be naïve to take Putin at his word that Russia has no designs on territory outside Crimea. He needs an atmosphere of continuous crisis and grievance to maintain support at home, to distract his own public from the corruption, stagnation, and repression that are his real record as a leader. Deterrence can be designed to expose Russia’s weakness: non-lethal military aid to Kiev, escalation of sanctions against Putin’s cronies, and the ultimate threat of financially targeting Russia’s energy sector. But no strategy will work if the U.S. and the European Union don’t act together, and America can no longer simply expect Europe to follow its lead. That was a different era.

Is all this Barack Obama’s fault, as Republicans in Congress and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have asserted? It’s true that the Administration seems caught off guard whenever a thug somewhere fails to act according to international norms. Putin no doubt views the President as weak, especially after Obama needed Russia to get him out of a jam of his own making over Syria’s chemical weapons—and, like any bully, Putin finds weakness provocative. But Crimea was a long time coming. In 2008, when George W. Bush was President, Putin, after voicing many of the resentments that the world heard last week, invaded the Republic of Georgia and all but annexed two predominantly Russian-speaking territories without even bothering to hold a referendum. An autocrat like Putin plays his own game, and always finds his own excuses. ♦