• For all the legitimate focus on rising U.S.-Chinese tensions, this summer’s sleeper surprise for the West is more likely to emerge from Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
• In the past, when matters have seemed sour for Moscow, Putin has turned to adventures abroad to solidify his domestic control.
• What’s difficult to predict is whether an August surprise — or one at any time ahead of U.S. elections in November — would grow more from Russia’s strength, its weakness, or more likely some combination of the two.

<

p style=”text-align:start”>What’s difficult to predict is whether an August surprise — or one at any time ahead of U.S. elections in November — would grow more from Russia’s strength, its weakness, or more likely some combination of the two. It has been times like these in the past when matters had seemed sour for Moscow that Putin has turned to adventures abroad to solidify his domestic control.

So should one be watching for a surprise of the sort of the Russo-Georgian war of August 2008, the seizure and annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, the Russian military intervention in the Syrian civil war from 2015 to the present, or more electoral and disinformation activity in Europe and particularly around U.S. elections this November?