In the months leading up to the Winter Olympics in and around the port city of Sochi, the world’s gaze shifted to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The goodwill carried by the international symbol of sportsmanship evaporated quickly, however. For it was just one month after the closing ceremonies, that Russia unilaterally annexed Crimea, Ukraine’s strategically useful Black Sea peninsula.
The move was shocking in the West, but less so in Russia, where the former KGB agent’s popularity and national pride surged. Moscow contends that feeling has led ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine to fight to rejoin the Russian fold. But NATO, whose Eastern members watched Russian tanks assemble on the border, and who have seen the military’s increasingly aggressive military exercises—some of which simulated the use of nuclear weapons against them—had other opinions.
Putin’s actions, followed by fighting in eastern Ukraine, undeniably altered the geopolitical landscape. Less visible are the ripples affecting the defense, space and commercial aviation realms. But Putin’s Russia was destined to upset all those sectors significantly in 2014.
Before the year was out, NATO had directed its member nations to spend 20% of their military budgets on new equipment. France had refused to deliver a high-priced warship it was under contract to build for Russia. Eastern European nations especially felt the chill. But nations throughout the West found themselves once again in the cat-and-mouse military games with Russian forces that seemed to have faded with the end of the Cold War. Decades before.