Another great book I’m reading, which helps me stay sane amongst the lies and false statements flying around social media, is Bob Woodward ‘s book, ‘War’.

At the stirrings of the Ukrainian invasion, Woodward reported in his book:

“Chekhov’s gun” was National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan’s immediate thought as he reviewed overhead satellite photos that showed an unprecedented 110,000 Russian troops massing on the border of Ukraine. If a pistol appears conspicuously in the first act of a play it is there for a reason and will be fired at some point, the 19th-century playwright Anton Chekhov had famously written. It was April 2021, only the third month of Biden’s presidency. Sullivan had barely settled into his new office in the White House West Wing. At 44, Sullivan, thin and fair-haired, was the youngest national security adviser since Henry Kissinger. With the discipline of a former marathon runner, Sullivan was the operational coordinator of Biden’s foreign policy. When Biden appointed him, Biden called Sullivan, a former Rhodes Scholar and Yale Law School honors graduate, “a once in a lifetime intellect” and had entrusted him with extraordinary decision-making authority. The intelligence also showed Russian naval forces were actively deploying to the Black Sea, a vast inland body of water bordered by Ukraine and Russia. Flatbed trucks could be seen hauling huge rocket launchers and old Soviet armored personnel carriers. More satellite photos showed Russian tanks, artillery, missiles and naval landing craft being moved into Crimea, on the northern coast of the Black Sea, and along the 1,200-mile land border between Russia and Ukraine. According to the latest CIA psychological profile, Vladimir Putin, the autocratic Russian leader, was defined by his extreme insecurity and imperial ambition. Putin was convinced that he was the only person that could restore Russia to the old Russian empire. He was fixated on Ukraine. What was Putin doing? Sullivan wondered. Was this just an exercise, a war game? Was it purely coercive to gain leverage on Ukraine or to force the United States and Europe to back off any talk that Ukraine might eventually join NATO, the world’s most powerful military and diplomatic alliance? It was also possible, Sullivan thought, that Putin was planning to use the troops to seize more territory in the Donbas. Russia and Ukraine had been fighting in the Donbas, a region in the east with sizable coal reserves, since 2014 when Russia seized neighboring Crimea and control of about a third of the Donbas. Nearly 14,000 people had been killed on both sides. There had been 29 cease-fires, all of which had failed, a sign of festering instability. Sullivan worked in a state of near constant intellectual anxiety. And yet he couldn’t look past the obvious: You don’t move that amount of men or matériel to another country’s border if you are not at least thinking about using them. Was Putin hanging his pistol on the wall? President Biden and Sullivan had debated what the administration’s Russia policy should look like. Biden was clear. “I’m not looking for a reset,” Biden said during his first weeks as president. “I’m not looking for some kind of good relationship, but I want to find a stable and predictable way forward with Putin.” But so far the relationship with Russia was neither good, stable, nor predictable. From their first days in office, Biden and Sullivan had been responding to various acts of Russian aggression. The near fatal poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, Russian interference in the 2020 U.S. elections, suggestions that Russians may have paid the Taliban to kill Americans in Afghanistan, and the massive SolarWinds cyberattack on more than 16,000 computer systems worldwide, including U.S. government departments and key private industries. It was one of the worst data breaches in U.S. history. Biden had also upped the tension in an ABC television interview on March 16, when he was asked if he thought Putin was a “killer”? “I do,” Biden said. The Kremlin had called the insult “unprecedented.” Putin withdrew the Russian ambassador from Washington in a show of displeasure……….

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American presidents had also been a target of Putin’s theatrics. In 2018, a week before then-President Trump’s summit with Putin in Helsinki, 12 Russian military intelligence agents were indicted in the U.S. for hacking the presidential campaign of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in her race against Trump. In a joint press conference following the summit, Putin played to Trump’s ego, flattering him. When Trump was asked about Russian interference in the 2016 election, Putin was rewarded with one of the most extraordinary statements by an American president. “He just said it’s not Russia,” Trump said. “I don’t see any reason why it would be.” Standing side by side, Trump appeared to strongly defend the Russian president and wave off the conclusions of U.S. intelligence agencies, which had unanimously determined that Russia had interfered. Condemnation was swift. Some senior Trump advisers still recoil at the memory of the president siding with Putin over the American intelligence agencies. Putin had again won the moment. Trump’s carelessness was on full display. After returning to the U.S., Trump tweeted, trying to fix the blunder: “I have GREAT confidence in MY intelligence people.”

So the scene was already set for what is happening today.