Victory at any price? Putin targets energy security in Ukraine escalation

When the war began, who would have thought that Moscow would be accused of blowing up its own natural gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea, or of playing atomic roulette with the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant? What is the Kremlin's calculation? 

And what signal does it send when Putin promotes as his top military commander in Ukraine the very same general who carpet-bombed Syria, Sergei Surovikin, also known as “the butcher”? More broadly, is the West getting any better at reading Russia than during the 22 previous years that Vladimir Putin has been in power?

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