Many outside observers have been scratching their heads over President Putin’s recent actions in Ukraine, with two questions coming up time and time again.

The first question is: What exactly is Putin trying to achieve? And it’s an understandable one given the often conflicting signals that the Russian administration has been sending since the outbreak of the crisis – one second Moscow is posturing for a diplomatic solution, and the next it’s hammering nails into the coffin of a ceasefire it was instrumental in bringing about in the first place.

President Putin seems to be operating with two goals in mind. The first is a geopolitical consideration, and it’s nothing new having haunted the calculations of Russian strategists since the days of the Napoleonic invasion. Putin is attempting to maintain an intermediate buffer zone between the heart of Russian power and the West, now embodied by the European Union and NATO. The mere hint of Ukraine signing an association agreement with the European Union was all it took to incense the Russian leadership, causing them to risk real economic retaliation and involve themselves directly in the Ukraine conflict. In this it’s important to note that many members of the Putin government (including the president himself) believe that the Ukraine ‘coup’ is simply the most recent of a long line of post-Cold War betrayals from the West, betrayals that began with informal assurances that NATO would not expand eastward into countries like Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

As far as Putin and his supporters are concerned, the West lied and took advantage of Russia’s moment of weakness through the 1990s with NATO’s eastward expansion, and into the 2000s with the United States’ withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Intervention in Ukraine, regardless of the political and economic consequences, was tantamount to drawing a line in the sand against the implacable creep of Western influence.

Unsurprisingly this is a narrative that resonates with the Russian public – that of Russia finally standing up to the West after enduring decades of its condescension – which explains the groundswell of domestic support for Putin’s Ukraine policy.

The second big question is: How far is Putin willing to go to achieve these goals? In the economic-heavy rationalizing that so often prevails in the Western media, many don’t understand why the Russian government would risk the economic well-being of its people in order to secure interests that seem so antiquated in our globalized, ‘post-history’ international society.