The first dramatic salvo came in the summer of 2008, when Russia intervened militarily to back separatist forces in the enclaves of Abkhazia and South Ossetia seeking to break away from Georgia. Russia’s military assault was brief but brutal, and involved bombing civilian populations both in the disputed areas and in the rest of Georgia, as well as attacking fleeing civilians. The overconfident pro-Western president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, was dealt a painful lesson courtesy of Putin, and the two breakaway “republics” remain under Russian occupation to this day. It was the first time since the end of the Soviet Union that Russia’s military violated the sovereignty of an independent state, but it would not be the last.

Since huge swaths of society rose up in color revolutions in the former Yugoslavia in 2000, in Georgia in 2003, and in Ukraine in 2004-2005—all to protest electoral fraud and bring about a transition from authoritarianism to democracy—Putin has behaved as if obsessed with fear that the virus of mass democratic mobilization might spread to Russia itself. Neither was he prepared to condone the “loss” of key parts of the former Soviet Union, such as Georgia and Ukraine, to any potential alliance structure with the West. As the forces of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution squandered their miraculous victory in corruption and political squabbling, Putin won another victory in 2010, when the pro-Russian villain of the rigged election that prompted the 2004 uprising, Viktor Yanukovych, finally won the presidency.

But Yanukovych’s authoritarianism and pro-Russia orientation—which led him to scuttle a much hoped-for association agreement between Ukraine and the EU—increasingly outraged the Ukrainian people, who ousted him in a second people-power revolution (the Euromaidan) in February 2014. Soon thereafter, Russian troops without insignias infiltrated Crimea and, with sympathetic local actors, seized control of its infrastructure. Militarily weak and bereft of Western military support—which in any case was difficult to deliver quickly and effectively due to the distance relative to Russia’s proximity—Ukraine watched helplessly as Putin consolidated his conquest with a pseudo-referendum that endorsed Crimea’s re-absorption into Russia.

It was the first time since the Nazis marauded across Europe in World War II that the boundaries of a European country had been altered by military aggression. But Putin did not stop there. In a replay of its shadowy campaign of aggression against Georgia, Russia infiltrated its troops and equipment into the Donbas region of far eastern Ukraine, in support (and probably orchestration) of separatist forces there. It was one of those eastern Ukrainian armed groups that used a Soviet-era missile system to shoot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on July 17, 2014. More blatant Russian military intervention followed, with Russia denying any involvement of its own soldiers, despite abundant evidence to the contrary. Today, Russia still occupies a portion of the Donbas region. A major swing state between West and East has been militarily violated and partially dismantled, and the story isn’t over yet.