Today is not a good day to be Vladimir Putin. A game that the Russian president was winning so deftly in the spring has turned on him in summer: The Ukrainian military is bearing down on the pro-Russian separatists in east Ukraine, and there’s word that it’s on the verge of splitting the rebel-held territory in two and that two major rebel leaders have fled. Putin's supporting these guys because of a position he staked out months ago, even though they’ve just gotten him into a whole lot of trouble by mistakenly shooting down a plane full of Dutch people. Which is why the Europeans have finally stopped allowing Putin to divide and conquer them, and announced their toughest sanctions to date, slamming his finance, defense, and energy industries. That's unfortunate, given that Europe is Russia's biggest energy market and that Russia depends on Europe for some 40 percent of its food and medicine. And, in case that wasn't enough, the United States piled on, too, sanctioning three major Russian banks.

And yet, there’s very little Putin can do. He's trapped by a propaganda apparatus that has primed the Russian population to want blood and victory, so there’s not all that much room behind him to beat a retreat. Even if it weren’t for the media, he's spent his entire 14-year tenure establishing Russia as a counterweight to American and European foreign policy. Has he been pushing back on Western righteousness and lecturing all these years just to back down now?

This is Putin today: a brash and unpredictable man backed into a corner with little, if any, way out. And it’s not a good Putin to be faced with.

His whole image mirrors that of the Russia he’s tried to create since he came to power in 2000: sovereign, strong, and unbowed by Western heckling. Putin, like the Russia he leads, likes to make decisions on his own terms. And he may very well lash out if the West demands he come out of that corner with his tail between his legs. This causes him to dig in his heels and resist at all costs, or to lash out. Because Putin, and Russia, do not follow commands, and they do not dance to the beat of Washington’s drum.

“Putin backed into a corner is not a great outcome for the West,” says Masha Lipman, a prominent Russian political analyst. She points out that boxing in the hard-to-predict leader of a massive military and nuclear power that has its fingers in various geopolitical pies that are of interest to the U.S. is quite risky. Will Russia retaliate by scuttling Iran talks? By forging a closer bond with China? And what will it make him do in Donetsk?