If you are leading the largest country and the most powerful army in the world, then you are supposed to know how to handle your relations with a country that is only a 30th of your nation's size – especially when its gross national product (GNP), its military stockpiles and other resources are no match. In this case, it is your responsibility to wipe out the threats you sense from it.

Do you believe Russian President Vladimir Putin could not react peacefully to the NATO courtship with Ukraine? Not only NATO’s verbal commitment but Ukraine's NATO membership should have been a manageable matter for a person who has been at the helm of Russia since the year 2000 (two terms as president, then four years as prime minister and third and fourth terms as president again: 21 years, 310 days!)

Putin should have known that (as Isaac Asimov, writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, said) violence is the last refuge of the incompetent – and everybody thought Putin was a competent leader. With the persistent Russian bombardment, we have learned how densely NATO has knitted its groundwork in Ukraine; however, the same bombardment is also killing Ukrainian children and their mothers.

In the past, the world analyzed the trauma Russian intellectuals faced when the only world they knew, the Soviet Union, had collapsed in 1991. We tried to understand the impact on the Russian psyche of being surrounded by NATO when the latter swallowed all the Warsaw Pact nations along Russia's European borders. Like individuals with agoraphobia and ochlophobia who have a hard time feeling safe in crowded places, Russian leaders felt unsafe with NATO's membership onslaught around their country. Especially Ukraine and Georgia's expressed desire to join the alliance must have put ants into Putin's and his cohort's pants.

But even that could have been managed peacefully. As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy understood in the third week of the Russian occupation that NATO had no real intention of accepting his country into its folds, Putin could have known that U.S. President Joe Biden had not promised him a readily available NATO membership in their phone call on Jan. 27 and their face-to-face Oval Office talk on Sept. 1. At that time, Putin had 130,000 soldiers and hundreds of tanks and artillery around Ukraine and that fact had a heavier impact on Biden and Zelenskyy than the fourth week of action. (Who knew the mighty Russian army was as symbolic as those operetta soldiers saluting Putin when he enters a ceremony hall?)

The writer of these lines never believed that Putin would actually, physically start a war with Ukraine. The disunity between the two shores of the Atlantic, one side thinking that NATO was "brain dead" and the other side accusing the Europeans of having free rides regarding NATO's spending would literally make the bloc as active as it had been in Yugoslavia and Libya. Putin was not another late Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic or late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, but the West seemed not ready to start the "great armageddon" to redesign the East. Putin had no reason to fear a NATO incursion first into Russia and through it into China. But thanks to Putin’s double miscalculations, the United States military buildup of sophisticated yet hard-to-detect modern weaponry in the hands of well-trained and highly organized nationalist Ukrainian militia has been very effective against the ungainly and unwieldy Russian tanks and Eastern Europeans – who, not agreeing with torpid NATO, rallied against the big brother who had made life so miserable for them in the Warsaw Pact. Thus, Putin is left with only one option.

The Antalya talks

Let's consider the wording of a potential peace agreement with Ukraine as expressed by Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba in Turkey's Antalya during his talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov when Kuleba said, "provide Ukraine some sort of security guaranty now." You don’t need to read the rest of his statement in which he talks about the "eventual membership in NATO." No sane-West European leader is going to acquiesce to the expansion of NATO after all this.

And then, Putin should start licking his wounds and think about a couple of things: