On a sunny afternoon in a park, a source dropped a USB drive into my hand, and we had a few moments of quiet conversation before anyone noticed. He corrected a mistake I hadn’t known I was making. I had called Putin a good chess player.

He looked at me with open irritation. “I wish you Americans would stop saying that. He doesn’t play chess. He plays Go. He even flies a GO master from China to Moscow to sharpen his game.”

I left that park with a different lens. Two decades of Putin’s erratic behavior began to make sense.

This article is about the cost of getting that wrong. It ends with one conclusion: the West must learn to play GO before the counting begins.

The Record of Analytical Failure

The evidence of Western miscalculation is extensive and well documented. In March 2014, as Russian forces without insignia seized Crimea, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry declared in bewilderment: “You just don’t in the twenty-first century behave in nineteenth-century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped-up pretext.”¹ The RAND Corporation noted that the Crimea intervention “caught many foreign policy analysts by surprise,” with articles explaining why Russia would never intervene running in Foreign Affairs, Time, and the New York Times until events proved them wrong.²

The pattern repeated in February 2022. A comprehensive study by Eliot Cohen and Phillips O’Brien examined 181 publications from twenty-six think tanks and found that “the vast majority of observers were caught by surprise by Putin’s invasion,” with most analysts insisting until days before the attack that a full-scale war remained unlikely.³ Reuters reported that it “spoke to more than a dozen sources, including Western intelligence officials and Russians familiar with Kremlin thinking, and nearly all agreed that an invasion is unlikely to be imminent.”⁴ Professor Lawrence Freedman of King’s College London, one of Britain’s most respected strategic thinkers, later acknowledged: “It still seemed to be such a self-evidently stupid move that I assumed that Putin had better options.”⁵

When the invasion came, Western analysts compounded their errors by predicting swift Russian victory. EU High Representative Josep Borrell later admitted: “We did not foresee how effectively Ukraine would resist.”⁶ The Jamestown Foundation catalogued nine fundamental errors in Western analysis, including the exaggeration of Russian military power, the underestimation of Ukrainian cohesion, and the belief in “fairy tales about Russian military reforms.”⁷

Economic predictions proved equally flawed. At the start of the war, the International Monetary Fund forecast the Russian economy to contract by 8.5 percent in 2022 and 2.3 percent in 2023.⁸ The Atlantic Council noted that these predictions of economic collapse represented “a far cry” from what actually occurred: Russian GDP grew 3.6 percent in 2023 and an estimated 4 percent in 2024.⁹ Carnegie Endowment researchers observed that “predictions of a double-digit contraction never materialized,” allowing Putin to brandish economic indicators “as proof that sanctions are ineffective.”¹⁰

Why this persistent pattern of error? The analytical failure extends beyond prediction to comprehension. As Foreign Policy observed in 2022, “The West today is looking at the problem in the wrong light,” focusing on “Moscow’s artificial pretexts for its invasion” while overlooking “Putin’s obsession with the so-called Western threat as well as his readiness to use escalation to coerce the West into a dialogue on Russian terms.”¹¹ Western analysts, the Geopolitical Monitor concluded, repeatedly got things wrong because they “looked at the situation through Western eyes” and proved incapable of understanding the cognitive frameworks through which Russian strategists perceive the world.¹²

Chess and Go: Two Grammars of Strategy

Chess is a game of elimination. Players seek to destroy opposing pieces, culminating in the capture or immobilization of the enemy king. The game ends decisively: one player wins, the other loses. Chess rewards tactical brilliance, the capacity to calculate sequences of moves that force the opponent into increasingly constrained positions until checkmate becomes inevitable. Time horizons are compressed; games typically last forty to sixty moves. Material advantage matters enormously; losing pieces weakens your position directly. The optimal strategy involves direct confrontation aimed at destroying the opponent’s capacity to resist.

GO operates on entirely different principles. It is the oldest continuously played board game in the world, originating in China more than 2,500 years ago, and it remains the most complex strategic game ever devised. Played on a 19x19 grid containing 361 intersection points, GO offers more possible game positions than atoms in the observable universe. The game’s objective is deceptively simple: surround more territory than your opponent. Yet the path to that objective requires a fundamentally different strategic orientation than Western game theory typically assumes. Players place their black or white stones to claim territory and encircle their opponent’s pieces. Pieces are not taken through direct attack but made useless through encirclement, their connections cut until they have nowhere productive to move. The player who wins is not the one who fights the most battles but the one who shapes the board so that every move the opponent makes grows weaker than the last. Influence matters as much as territory, and a skilled player can hold very little secured ground while controlling the entire game, because what he is managing is not land but the choices available to his opponent. Narrow those choices far enough, and the opponent defeats himself without a conclusive battle taking place.

In Go, there are opening moves that secure strong corners. There are forcing moves that freeze the board in an advantageous state. There is the concept of aji, a latent threat left deliberately unresolved, ready to be exploited later when the moment suits. There is thickness, the accumulation of influence that does not immediately translate into territory but makes every subsequent move stronger. And there are cutting points, weaknesses inside an opponent’s position where his stones can be separated and turned against each other.

Victory conditions. Chess ends with checkmate. GO ends when both players agree to stop and count territory. Putin has never sought NATO’s destruction or America’s collapse. He seeks to expand Russian influence while accepting that Western power will persist. GO assumes competitive coexistence. So does he.

Time horizons. Chess games compress into dozens of moves. GO games extend beyond three hundred, with opening placements whose benefits materialize only in the endgame. Putin’s military and political investments often mature over years or decades. The KGB officers trained in Moscow during the Cold War became the mayors and intelligence officials who shape Eastern European politics today. The energy infrastructure built in the 1990s and 2000s created dependencies that constrained European responses to Russian aggression for two decades thereafter.

Sacrifice logic. Chess players guard pieces jealously; losing material directly weakens position. GO players routinely sacrifice stones in one area to gain advantage elsewhere. Putin accepted devastating sanctions twice, first after Crimea in 2014 and again after the full invasion in 2022, trading economic territory for geographic and strategic territory. Whether this trade proves wise remains contested. That it reflects coherent strategic logic is visible through the GO lens.

And Russia plays every part of the board at once. While Western attention fixates on the Donbas front lines, Russian military contractors expand across the Sahel, Russian naval vessels visit Cuban ports, Russian hackers probe European infrastructure, and Russian influence operations target elections from Moldova to Romania to Georgia.

This is what Russia has been doing to the decision-making of governments. The question is how.

Reflexive Control: The Cognitive Dimension

Go explains the positional logic. It does not fully explain how the strategy is put into practice. For this, we must turn to reflexive control, a concept developed by Soviet military theorists that provides the cognitive complement to Go’s positional framework.

Reflexive control, articulated most fully by Vladimir Lefebvre in the 1960s and subsequently integrated into Soviet and Russian military doctrine, describes the practice of conveying information to an adversary that causes the adversary to make decisions serving your interests rather than their own.¹³ The target of reflexive control believes they are making autonomous, rational choices when in fact their decision-making process has been shaped through carefully constructed information, signals, or situational framing.

The essential insight is that you do not force your opponent to act in a certain way. You shape their perception of reality so that they voluntarily choose the action you desire. The opponent’s decision appears rational from their perspective because they are operating within a manipulated information environment. Reflexive control succeeds when the target cannot distinguish between their own reasoning and the reasoning that has been induced.

Soviet theorists identified multiple vectors through which reflexive control operates: transmission of false information about capabilities or intentions, creation of situations that appear to offer only certain response options, exploitation of known cognitive biases and decision-making patterns, manipulation of the adversary’s understanding of your own decision-making process, and shaping of the information environment through which the adversary perceives events.¹⁴

The doctrine never left Russian military thinking. It moved from Cold War academic theory into the operational planning of a state that now runs information campaigns, hybrid operations, and political interference as standard practice. What Lefebvre described on paper, Putin executes on a continental scale.

The Synthesis

The two frameworks operate simultaneously on the physical and the decision-making planes. GO provides the positional logic: what to pursue, where to place stones, how to project influence, when to sacrifice for advantage. Reflexive control provides the operational method: how to shape adversary perception so they voluntarily cede territory, accept unfavorable positions, or refrain from contesting your advances.

This synthesis manifests in several observable patterns of Russian strategic behavior.

Nuclear rhetoric as reflexive control through GO positioning. Putin’s nuclear threats function as GO stones that project influence without requiring direct action. Western decision-makers, perceiving nuclear risk, voluntarily constrain their own options: limiting weapons transfers to Ukraine, refusing direct intervention, calibrating responses to avoid “escalation.” Putin shapes the information environment so that Western leaders choose restraint on their own, believing it the “rational” response to perceived risk, and he does it without firing a single warhead. CNN noted that throughout the Ukraine war, “every time the West has considered sending new technology to Ukraine, the Kremlin has warned of dire consequences, potentially involving a nuclear strike.”¹⁵ The threat functions as reflexive control, inducing adversary decisions that serve Russian interests.

Economic resilience narratives as reflexive control. Putin brandishes economic indicators as proof that sanctions are ineffective, while the Kremlin suppresses unfavorable data and constructs what Carnegie researchers describe as “synthetic reality.”¹⁶ This is reflexive control aimed at Western policymakers and publics. If sanctions appear ineffective, the “rational” conclusion is to question whether maintaining them justifies the costs. Western decision-makers who reduce sanctions pressure based on perceived Russian resilience are making choices that serve Russian interests while believing they are responding rationally to observed evidence.

Probing as reflexive control calibration. GO players probe opponent positions to gather information before committing to major operations. Putin’s sequential probing (Georgia 2008, Crimea 2014, Syria 2015) served to map Western decision-making psychology. Each probe revealed how Western leaders process information, what thresholds trigger responses, and what framings induce passivity. The weak Western response to Georgia transmitted information that shaped Russian calculations about Crimea. The fait accompli acceptance in Crimea transmitted information that shaped calculations about further expansion. Each Western response (or non-response) provided intelligence enabling more precise calibration of subsequent reflexive control operations.

Multi-domain positioning creates reflexive control vectors. By placing stones across energy, food, political, electoral, and information domains, Putin creates multiple channels through which reflexive control can operate. European leaders who perceive energy dependence make “rational” decisions to moderate criticism of Russia. African leaders who perceive food dependence make “rational” decisions to abstain from UN votes condemning Russian aggression. Politicians who have received Russian support make “rational” decisions to advocate policies favorable to Moscow. Each dependency is both territory and a channel through which adversary decisions can be shaped.

Exploiting Western cognitive frameworks. Reflexive control is most effective when it exploits the target’s existing beliefs and decision-making patterns. Putin has demonstrated sophisticated understanding of Western cognitive frameworks: the preference for negotiated solutions, the aversion to nuclear risk, the assumption that economic actors behave rationally, the belief that sanctions will change regime behavior, the expectation that military casualties will erode domestic support, the tendency to interpret adversary behavior through mirror-imaging. Each Western assumption becomes a lever for reflexive control. Information designed to activate these frameworks produces decisions favorable to Russian interests while appearing to Western decision-makers as autonomous rational responses to objective conditions.

Understanding the contest at the level where it is actually being decided requires setting aside the chess metaphor and what it hides. The most consequential moves in this conflict are often the ones that never appear on a map. They happen inside institutions, inside policy meetings, inside the framing of questions that determine which options get considered and which get ruled out before anyone sits down to argue about them. The strategy at work here is aimed at the slow, patient reshaping of a board on which the opponent’s every move grows a little weaker, a little more costly, a little more cut off from the moves around it, until the position gives way not through defeat in any single battle but through the weight of decisions made inside a frame that someone else built.

Georgia, 2008: The First Stone

In August 2008, Russian forces moved into Georgia and stopped. They did not march to Tbilisi, did not annex the country, did not push for a result that would force a clear Western response. They took South Ossetia and Abkhazia, declared them independent, and settled into a position that was militarily defensible and diplomatically murky enough to resist easy challenge. Western governments issued statements. NATO held emergency meetings. Nothing changed on the ground, and within weeks the crisis had faded from front pages that had other things to cover.

What did not fade was the lesson. Russia was not trying to conquer Georgia. It was placing a stone on the board and watching how the board responded, and what it saw was that the board responded with words. The message that reached every capital between Berlin and Bishkek was the same: resistance carries a real price, and Western security guarantees have measurable limits when tested. Every leader in that region made subsequent decisions carrying that lesson with him, and those decisions had human consequences that nobody in Brussels or Washington was prepared to account for. Ukraine pushed harder toward NATO membership. Belarus moved closer to Moscow. Armenia hedged its bets for years before the consequences caught up with it in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023, when Azerbaijan retook the enclave in a single operation and the international community moved on within a week, leaving behind a population that had staked its future on the assumption that someone would intervene. One five-day military campaign shaped the thinking of an entire region for fifteen years.

The operation, undertaken while global attention focused on the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, served classic GO purposes. It tested opponent reactions before committing to larger operations. It secured permanent territorial gains through recognized breakaway regions and refined tactics for future application. The Atlantic Council’s assessment is direct: “The weak international response to Russia’s invasion of Georgia greenlighted Russia’s subsequent military assault on Ukraine.”²⁵ The tactical playbook deployed in Georgia (cyberattacks, disinformation, passport distribution, claims of genocide, swift military action) reappeared in Ukraine six years later. Georgia was a probe stone, placed to gauge Western resolve. When NATO and the EU failed to respond decisively, Putin learned that the West would accept territorial faits accompli rather than risk confrontation.

The Opening: Crimea, 2014

In Go, the strongest opening moves claim the corners. Corners are the most strategic ground on the board because they require fewer stones to secure and they anchor following moves toward the center.

Crimea was Russia’s corner.

In February and March of 2014, Russian forces invaded Crimea and seized it before the West could organize a press release. The EU immediately described it as illegal annexation, and the European Court of Human Rights reported on extensive violations against the population. Russia had taken one of the most strategically valuable pieces of real estate in Eastern Europe, a warm-water naval base that gave it a fortified Black Sea stronghold, a political and symbolic win that played powerfully at home, and a platform for further moves into Ukraine. The far more consequential victory was the destruction of a precedent.

In 1994, Ukraine surrendered more than 1,200 nuclear warheads, at the time the third-largest arsenal on earth, in exchange for security assurances from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia under the Budapest Memorandum. The signatories committed to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty, refrain from the threat or use of force against its territory, and refrain from economic coercion. Twenty years later, one signatory invaded. The other two issued statements. The message received by every government on earth with a nuclear program or considering one was plain: security assurances from the West are worth the paper they are printed on, and the only reliable guarantee of sovereignty is the weapon Ukraine agreed to give up. North Korea, Iran, and every future proliferator took that lesson, and it has not been unlearned. Putin demonstrated that the Western security architecture could be violated by a signatory to its own agreements without consequence severe enough to reverse the act, and that demonstration echoes in every negotiation about nuclear programs, security guarantees, and alliance commitments conducted since.

The Crimea annexation also represents Putin’s most direct application of Go’s sacrifice principle. Following the Euromaidan revolution that overthrew Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Putin faced the potential permanent loss of Ukraine to Western alignment. His response sacrificed economic territory to secure geographic and strategic territory. Western sanctions reduced Russian economic growth by an estimated 1 to 2 percent annually. By 2025, the cumulative cost to Russia’s economy ran into hundreds of billions of dollars in foregone growth.²⁶ Yet Putin secured Crimea permanently, preserved Russia’s Sevastopol naval base and created a frozen conflict in the Donbas that prevented Ukrainian NATO integration. It generated enormous domestic popularity by defending “Russian” lands. The Washington Institute observed that Putin correctly calculated Western response: “the West did not push back decisively.”²⁶

No chess player takes the opponent’s king in the opening. A GO player secures his corners. Putin secured his corner first, and everything that followed was built on that foundation.

Syria, 2015: Efficient Positioning

When Russia intervened to rescue Assad’s collapsing regime, Western analysts predicted quagmire. Six years later, the Washington Institute concluded that Putin “has largely prevailed” and “achieved his key objectives without incurring crippling costs.”²⁷ Russia established permanent Mediterranean bases with 49-year agreements, “realizing a strategic aspiration that eluded Russian czars and Soviet leaders.” Putin demonstrated that Russia would stand by allies when the West would not. He tested weapons systems and tactics later deployed in Ukraine and built the Wagner Group model that now projects Russian power across Africa.

The intervention exemplifies Go’s emphasis on efficient positioning: achieving maximum influence with minimum commitment, placing stones that project power far beyond their immediate location. Syria was about establishing Russia as a player whose commitments carry weight, whose allies can count on support, and whose military capacity extends well beyond its borders. Every African government that subsequently signed a military cooperation agreement with Moscow made that decision in part because of what happened in Damascus. The contrast with Western behavior in Libya, where NATO intervened and then left a failed state behind, was not lost on leaders in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa who were looking for a security partner willing to stay. Russia offered that, and the offer carried credibility because of Syria.

The China Pivot: Trading Boards

Perhaps Putin’s most consequential long-term sacrifice has been trading Western economic integration for Eastern alignment. Following 2014 sanctions, Russia accelerated its “pivot to the East.” Initial results disappointed: Chinese investment in Russia declined 92.3 percent between 2013 and 2018 as Chinese banks feared secondary sanctions. The $400 billion Power of Siberia pipeline required Russia to bear full construction costs while selling gas at Gazprom’s lowest rate.²⁸ Yet by 2024, bilateral trade reached $245 billion, double the 2020 level. China now absorbs Russian exports that Europe once purchased. Chinese technology fills gaps created by Western export controls. Russia’s share of imports from China more than doubled between 2021 and 2024. As MERICS observed, “For Russia, trade with China constitutes a lifeline.”²⁹

Putin traded European economic territory for Eastern alliance territory, accepting asymmetric dependence as the price of strategic freedom from Western economic pressure. In GO terms, he conceded stones on one part of the board to build connections on another, calculating that the position he was gaining would prove more resilient under pressure than the position he was giving up. The full-scale invasion in 2022 and the sanctions that followed validated half of that calculation: Western economic weapons that might have been decisive against a Russia still integrated into European markets had far less effect against a Russia that had already rerouted its most important economic relationships eastward. The other half, whether dependence on China proves to be freedom or a different kind of constraint, remains an open question on the board.

Minsk: Keeping the Position Open

After Russia seized Crimea and ignited the Donbas conflict in 2014, two ceasefire agreements followed. European leaders flew to Minsk, documents were signed, and the process produced a set of terms that looked, from a distance, like a path toward peace. The fighting did not stop, and the agreements were never honored.

Years later, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel acknowledged publicly that Minsk had been intended to buy Ukraine time to strengthen its military. Russian officials made the same acknowledgment from their side. Neither party had worked toward a genuine end to the fighting because neither believed the process would produce one, and both were right.

What Russia got from Minsk was something worth more to it than peace. It got eight years of managed, normalized conflict. And normalization is the most insidious instrument in this entire strategy, more dangerous than any weapon system and harder to counter than any military advance. When a war becomes normal, people stop feeling the urgency of it. Politicians stop paying the political cost of addressing it. Funding cycles quietly deprioritize it. Journalists move to fresher stories. The people living inside that normalized conflict, the families in the Donbas who spent eight years in basements and bomb shelters, who buried their relatives and sent their children to school past checkpoints, did not experience those years as background noise. But the foreign ministries of Europe did, and that distance is what Russia needed.

During those eight years, Russian-backed forces dug defensive lines across eastern Ukraine and Russia rebuilt its military on a scale that would have been difficult to justify without the conflict as cover. When the full invasion came in February 2022, it arrived into a security order that had spent eight years treating the Donbas as a manageable irritant rather than a warning about something larger. The cost of that mistake is now visible in every direction: in the casualty figures, in the destroyed cities, in the millions of Ukrainians who left and the hundreds of thousands who did not survive to do so.

Russia kept the position open long enough to consolidate what it needed. Forcing a genuine end to the fighting in 2014 might have clarified the stakes early enough to unite the West at a moment acutely dangerous for Moscow. Instead Russia preserved its options, Western attention drifted, and the board evolved in directions that suited the player who had never stopped thinking about it. Putin kept playing a game that no one knew was taking place.

The Invasion: Converting Influence into Territory

The February 2022 invasion was Russia’s largest single attempt to turn accumulated influence into secured territory. The opening phase included a thrust toward Kyiv that failed. But the southern advance succeeded, and it is the southern advance that reveals the GO logic most clearly.

Russia’s forces drove along Ukraine’s coast and created a land bridge connecting the Donbas, which Russia had backed since 2014, to Crimea, which Russia had seized in 2014. The stones placed eight years earlier were being connected. A position built across years of patient accumulation was being converted into something that looked, at least to Moscow, like a continuous and defensible line.

Russia today occupies roughly 20 percent of Ukrainian territory. The land bridge to Crimea exists. The early stones placed in 2014 now sit inside a larger claimed territory. The board looks different from the board of 2013, and it looks that way because someone was thinking about it as a board.

Putin’s assumptions about the invasion proved catastrophically wrong: Ukrainians resisted rather than capitulating. Western unity exceeded expectations and Russian military performance exposed profound weaknesses. Yet Putin’s response to failure demonstrates GO adaptability. When the drive to Kyiv collapsed, he pivoted to attritional warfare in eastern Ukraine, abandoning hopeless positions to concentrate on achievable objectives. Whether this shift represents strategic success or catastrophic overextension remains contested; that Putin adapted to unexpected resistance rather than doubling down on failed approaches reflects GO principles.

Annexation: Claiming the Framework Before Securing It

In September 2022, Russia announced the annexation of four Ukrainian regions: Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson. Russian forces did not fully control any of them. Ukrainian forces held significant ground inside all four. The annexation was declared anyway.

In Go, a player sometimes claims a large, expansive framework of potential territory before it is secured, in order to alter the psychological and legal status of the fight over it. The claim changes what the opponent is defending. It changes how observers read the board. And it changes the domestic political cost of giving ground, because conceding what has been claimed as your own carries a different weight than losing contested space.

The EU identified Russia’s annexation of those four regions alongside Crimea in 2014 and the full invasion in 2022 as the three primary triggers for its sanctions regime. The international community rejected the annexation. Russia pressed on regardless, treating international rejection as the price of changing the board’s terms rather than as a reason to stop. What matters from Moscow’s perspective is not whether the international community accepts the claim. What matters is that the claim has been made, that it now shapes the domestic political conversation inside Russia, that it alters the perceived stakes of any future negotiation, and that every month it stands unchallenged on the ground makes it harder to reverse at a table. The annexation was a statement about the future, not a description of the present.

Attrition: Thickening Under Pressure

When the rapid advance on Kyiv failed in the spring of 2022, Russia shifted to attritional warfare along a front line stretching more than a thousand kilometers, accepting severe losses in exchange for incremental gains and the preservation of board presence.

This is not the move of a chess player who has seen his attack fail. A chess player in that position is in genuine danger. A GO player who falls back on thickness and attrition is making a different calculation: that local sacrifice is worth it if the overall position holds, that the opponent’s ability to convert tactical successes into something larger can be prevented through sheer endurance, and that time itself is a resource.

Russia has taken losses on a scale that has surprised most Western observers. Casualties have approached one million killed and wounded since February 2022. It has continued costly, grinding assaults that produce small territorial gains at high human cost, advancing roughly 176 square miles per month at a price in lives that would be politically unsustainable in any Western democracy.³⁰ From the outside, this looks like failure. From inside the logic of the strategy, it looks like a player who has decided the open board still favors him, and who is willing to pay the price of keeping it open. Russia’s tolerance for casualties reflects something deeper than authoritarian indifference to human life, though that is certainly part of it. It reflects a strategic calculation that the opponent’s political system cannot match this tolerance, that Western publics watching the numbers accumulate will eventually pressure their governments to seek an end to the fighting on whatever terms are available, and that the side willing to absorb more pain for longer will ultimately hold the board when the counting comes.

Energy Infrastructure: Reduction Moves

The systematic attacks on Ukraine’s power generation and transmission facilities, which began in October 2022 and have continued through the present are reduction moves, aimed at cutting down Ukraine’s capacity to function as a state over time.

In Go, a reduction move does not try to kill the opponent’s position outright. It makes his territory smaller, his options fewer, and his stones less connected. Applied to a country rather than a board, the logic is the same: attack the energy supply, the hospitals, the heat, and the light, and the population’s ability to endure a long war begins to erode. The will of Ukraine’s allies, watching a partner struggle through a second and third winter of deliberate infrastructure destruction, is also under pressure.

Major Russian strikes hit Ukraine’s power grid in the days before ceasefire talks in early 2026. On Easter weekend of 2026, Russia launched one of its largest combined drone and missile attacks of the war. These are not the moves of a side preparing to make peace. They are the moves of a player trying to reduce the opponent’s position before any settlement fixes the board. The timing is itself a form of communication. Attacking energy infrastructure before a ceasefire discussion tells the other side, and the mediators, and the watching world, that the price of continued fighting will keep rising. It tells Ukraine’s population that the winter ahead will be worse than the winter behind. And it tells Western governments that the cost of supporting Ukraine will keep growing, a message calibrated to activate the same cost-sensitivity that reflexive control depends on across every other front of this conflict.

Occupied Territory: Building What Cannot Be Given Back

Since 2022, Russia has invested approximately $11.8 billion in the occupied Ukrainian territories, building roads, railways, ports, and administrative connections that bind those regions to Russia and to Crimea. A Reuters investigation published in March 2026 confirmed more than 2,500 kilometers of roads and rail completed or upgraded, including the Azov Ring highway and the Novorossiya Railways.³¹ These infrastructure projects are the physical conversion of claimed territory into something harder to return: land with Russian roads running through it, Russian trains crossing it, Russian administrative systems embedded in it.

In Go, securing a position means building internal connections that make it stable under pressure. Russia is doing that work in occupied Ukraine right now, not waiting for a peace agreement to settle the question, but building facts that any future agreement will have to reckon with. Each new road, each completed rail line, says the same thing: this territory is not under negotiation. Western policy that treats the final status of these territories as something to be resolved at a negotiating table must account for the fact that Russia is resolving that status on the ground, every day, in concrete and steel and administrative systems that are far harder to dismantle than to build.

The Multi-Domain Board: Redefining Territory

The case studies above trace Russian strategy across geography and time. But the board Putin is playing on extends far beyond the territory visible on any map. When Western analysts discuss Russian territorial ambitions, they typically mean geography: Crimea, the Donbas, the land bridge to Transnistria. That narrow definition is itself a product of chess thinking. GO territory includes every domain where influence can be projected and an opponent’s options constrained. For Putin, this expanded board includes at minimum the following domains.

Energy territory. Before 2022, Russia supplied roughly 40 percent of European gas imports. Germany received approximately 55 percent of its gas from Russian sources. The Nord Stream pipelines, with combined capacity of 110 billion cubic meters annually, bypassed Eastern European transit states, allowing Russia to pressure different European nations independently. The Atlantic Council observed that this infrastructure placed “100 million Europeans in geopolitical limbo.”¹⁷ Scholars have documented more than 55 instances since 1991 where Russia weaponized energy supplies for political purposes.

Food territory. Russia and Ukraine together supply approximately 44 percent of Africa’s wheat consumption. Fifteen African countries depend on these two nations for more than half their wheat imports; six exceed 70 percent dependence. When Russia blockaded Ukrainian ports following the 2022 invasion, wheat prices across Africa rose 60 percent, and the continent faced a 30-million-ton grain shortage in the first year alone. The Black Sea Grain Initiative, brokered in July 2022, allowed Ukraine to export 32.9 million metric tons before Russia terminated the agreement in July 2023. Following termination, Russia positioned itself as the alternative supplier, delivering 200,000 tons of free wheat to six African nations by February 2024 while simultaneously supporting a BRICS grain exchange designed to challenge Western pricing mechanisms and dollar dominance.¹⁸ Control over food flows provides leverage over governments across continents.

Political territory. Bulgaria exemplifies Russian penetration of foreign political systems. Most Bulgarian Cold War era foreign intelligence officers received training at the KGB academy in Moscow. A 2006 law exposed hundreds of politicians, diplomats, and journalists as former collaborators with communist security services.¹⁹ Lukoil maintains near-monopoly control over Bulgarian oil processing and distribution, with its port at Rosenets operating as what observers describe as a “Russian enclave” exempt from Bulgarian oversight. Russia’s economic footprint in Bulgaria approaches 20 percent of GDP. Security services have arrested multiple defense officials for espionage.

Electoral territory. The 2024 election cycle revealed systematic Russian interference across Eastern Europe. In Romania, intelligence services documented coordinated influence operations involving over 25,000 TikTok accounts and more than 1,000 Telegram channels supporting a far-right candidate who praised Putin and promised to end Ukraine aid. That candidate won the first round with 22.94 percent before Romania’s Constitutional Court annulled the election, citing “Russian hybrid actions.” In Moldova, authorities documented vote-purchasing schemes orchestrated by an oligarch exiled in Russia. In Georgia, the ruling party aligned with Russian objectives while authorities became, in observers’ words, “enablers” of interference. CSIS documented that Russian attacks against European targets nearly tripled between 2023 and 2024.²⁰ Military territory beyond Ukraine. Wagner Group and its successor Africa Corps now operate in at least six African countries: the Central African Republic, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Libya, and Sudan. Putin has stated that Russia maintains military cooperation agreements with more than 40 African nations. Africa Corps, established in 2024 under direct Russian Ministry of Defense control, has expanded significantly, with satellite imagery revealing substantial facility construction at Modibo Keita Airport in Mali.²¹ Three Sahel nations have formed an “Alliance of Sahel States” aligned with Moscow and withdrawn from ECOWAS. Russian forces secured diamond and gold mining concessions in the Central African Republic while capturing the strategic town of Kidal in Mali. All of it built while Western attention remained fixed on Ukraine.

Alliance territory in the Western Hemisphere. General Gerasimov stated in December 2024 that “Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela are strategic partners.”²¹ Russia provides 90 percent of Nicaragua’s weapons. A Russian training center in Managua has graduated 1,700 police officers from 13 Latin American countries. Russian intelligence operates from Nicaraguan military installations. In June 2024, Russian naval vessels including a nuclear submarine visited Cuba and Venezuela, demonstrating power projection into America’s immediate neighborhood.

Institutional territory. Fair Trials reported in 2024 that one in five Interpol Red Notices issued between 2018 and 2023 showed signs of political motivation, with 38 percent of all Red Notices in 2021 originating from Russia.²² Prominent cases include anti-corruption campaigner Bill Browder, targeted by at least seven Russian Red Notice requests. The U.S. Helsinki Commission characterized this practice as extending Russia’s reach to harass opponents globally.²² Russia has learned to weaponize international institutions, exploiting procedures designed for legitimate law enforcement to persecute dissidents and project state power beyond its borders.

Infrastructure as contested territory. CSIS documented that Russian attacks against European critical infrastructure tripled between 2023 and 2024, following a quadrupling between 2022 and 2023. IISS reported a 246 percent increase in attacks from 2023 to 2024.²³ In November 2024, two Baltic Sea fiber optic cables were severed. On Christmas Day 2024, an undersea power cable between Finland and Estonia was cut along with additional telecom cables. Former President Medvedev stated that “no constraints remain” preventing attacks on ocean floor communications infrastructure.²³ NATO officials have identified a “Russian Undersea Research Program” that functions as a paramilitary structure mapping cables and pipelines across European waters.

The Internal Board: Attacking Connectivity

In Go, a cutting point is a weakness in an opponent’s position where the connections between stones can be severed, causing a formation that looked strong to break into isolated groups that can no longer help each other. The groups do not disappear, but they lose the ability to act together, and strength that cannot be brought to bear is no strength at all.

A GO player does not only attack the opponent’s frontier. He attacks the connections inside the opponent’s position, the links between stones that allow a formation to function as a whole. Sever those connections and the formation, however large, begins to act like a collection of isolated pieces rather than a coherent force.

Russia has been attacking the connectivity of Western institutions for years. The EU now formally describes Russia as running sustained campaigns against member states and partners that include information manipulation, interference in elections, sabotage, cyber attacks, and other activities designed not to win territory but to weaken the bonds that hold the alliance together. These campaigns do not make headlines the way missile strikes do. But their purpose is the same: narrow the opponent’s options by degrading his ability to act as a unit.

Hungary has served as a cutting point inside this effort. During negotiations over successive EU sanctions packages, Budapest has withheld agreement until exemptions or changes were secured, slowing measures at the moments when speed mattered most. The fourteenth package in 2024 was delayed for weeks over Hungarian objections to provisions targeting Russian energy transit revenues. A leaked call involving Hungary’s foreign minister, reported just days ago, raised direct questions about whether Budapest was sharing information about EU sanctions discussions with Moscow. Whether every allegation proves out, the structural fact is clear: Moscow benefits whenever EU unity becomes slow, fragile, and negotiable, and Hungary has made it all three, repeatedly, at critical moments. The direct effect of those delays was real but limited. The broader effect was considerably larger, because each episode sent a clear signal to Moscow that the EU’s unanimity requirement could be used as a brake on collective action, that the price of Western unity could be negotiated down by a single government willing to hold out, and that this would remain true at every subsequent moment of pressure. Russia did not need Hungary to block Western policy permanently. It needed Hungary to make unity expensive, and expensive enough that concessions became the easier path for governments with other priorities competing for their attention.

But Hungary may not remain the only such cutting point for long. On April 19, 2026, Bulgaria goes to the polls for the seventh time in five years, and what happens in Sofia that day could hand Moscow a second permanent veto inside the European Union.

The Bulgarian election is a significant concern. Bulgaria operates Soviet-era artillery manufacturing capacity that currently supplies a significant share of the 155mm shells reaching Ukraine’s front lines. It holds a veto in the European Council. And it anchors NATO’s Black Sea flank against ongoing Russian naval posturing. If the election produces a pro-Russian government, all three of those assets become liabilities.

With the vote now sixteen days away, grave consequences will be determined. Every major polling agency in Bulgaria tells the same story. Alpha Research puts Progressive Bulgaria at 30.8 percent in its March 29 survey, Sova Harris at 30.9 percent, Gallup International Balkans at 29.8 percent, and a Myara poll released this week at 30.8 percent. Radev’s formation has led consistently in the low-to-mid thirties since February, a margin of eight to ten points above the second-place GERB-UDF coalition. The pro-European center remains split between two rival formations polling around 11 and 19 percent respectively, meaning neither can form a majority on its own. The parties that would complete a Radev-led coalition, the nationalist Vazrazhdane and elements of the United Left, are openly skeptical of Western support for Ukraine. Together the bloc favorable to Radev commands close to 45 percent of decided voters. Declared turnout projections of 49 to 55 percent suggest higher participation than recent elections, but voter fatigue from seven consecutive votes in five years tends to suppress pro-European urban constituencies disproportionately. The kingmaker question, whether Radev can form a government without relying on Peevski’s DPS or on Vazrazhdane, will determine whether Moscow gets the compliant Sofia it is waiting for, or only a weakened and distracted one.

The coalition arithmetic, however, is not even the most striking feature of this picture. The likely kingmaker is Delian Peevski, whose Movement for Rights and Freedoms controls 9.0 percent of the vote. Peevski is a media oligarch sanctioned under the U.S. Global Magnitsky Act for significant corruption and involvement in serious human rights abuse. A coalition that markets itself as defending Bulgarian sovereignty from Western interference may well depend for its parliamentary majority on a man the United States sanctioned precisely for undermining Bulgarian institutions. That is not coincidence. It is the quality of material that ends up filling the vacuum when five years of political instability exhaust a population’s capacity to pay attention.

The pattern behind that exhaustion is familiar. Five years of revolving governments have ground judicial reform to a halt and made political predictability something Bulgarians no longer expect. Illicit Russian financing flooded Moldova’s 2025 parliamentary elections. Romania’s 2024 presidential vote was annulled after intelligence agencies confirmed TikTok algorithm manipulation and illegal Kremlin-linked funding. German intelligence flagged severe meddling risks ahead of the 2025 federal elections. Bulgaria appears to be the next in a sequence that is neither accidental nor improvised.

The strategic consequences of a Radev government would not be limited to ammunition transfers. Bulgaria would become a second reliable veto partner for sanctions extensions that currently require EU unanimity. It would deepen its reliance on Russian gas through TurkStream, reversing hard-won energy diversification. It would add a second dissenting voice inside NATO’s consensus-based decision structure at the moment when the alliance can least absorb additional internal friction. Two vetoes are not twice as damaging as one. In a system built on unanimity, two vetoes in the right positions can paralyze the entire formation.

Ivan Zheved, who heads the Bulgarian civil society organization GID, put it plainly: “A pro-Russian coalition government in Sofia could halt the supply of ammunition and weapons to Ukraine and create a new government in Eastern Europe similar to Orban’s.”

Moscow does not need to win the Bulgarian election. It needs the right Bulgarian government to win it.

There is something troubling about watching all of this unfold, and the trouble is not simply strategic. The EU was built on the premise that European nations, having learned from the catastrophic cost of their divisions in the twentieth century, would choose unity over narrow national interest when it mattered most. Watching that premise erode, watching one member state after another insert itself as a point of friction in the response to a war of territorial conquest on European soil, is not only a management problem for alliance diplomats. It is a question about what the European project means when tested by something serious, and whether the answer, repeated enough times, eventually changes the project itself.

Nuclear Signals and the Frozen Decision

Nuclear rhetoric is among the most effective applications of reflexive control in Russia’s arsenal. It is a stone placed inside the opponent’s head. The territory it claims is the space between perceiving a threat and deciding what to do about it. The purpose is not to prepare the ground for nuclear use but to introduce a variable that makes every Western decision slower, every debate longer, and every bold action harder to authorize.

In the autumn of 2022, Ukrainian forces recaptured Kherson and pressed into Zaporizhzhia, putting Russian lines under real pressure for the first time since the opening weeks of the war. Russia’s response was not a clear military counter-move but a sustained drumbeat of nuclear references, vague enough to deny as threats but specific enough that no responsible government could dismiss them. Senior Russian officials raised nuclear doctrine in interviews. State television personalities walked through scenarios involving European capitals. The signals were placed in the space between threat and noise, where they would be impossible to ignore but equally impossible to confront directly.

Somewhere in Washington, in the autumn of 2022, officials who understood that Ukrainian forces had momentum, who knew that longer-range weapons could change the course of the war, who had seen what Russian forces were doing to Ukrainian civilians, sat in rooms and argued about escalation thresholds instead of acting on what they knew. The ATACMS missiles Ukraine had been requesting were withheld for more than a year. F-16 aircraft took longer still. Each delay was framed in terms of escalation risk, and that framing was not dishonest, the risk was real and had to be weighed. But every argument for bolder support had to clear the escalation question first, and clearing it consumed political time, senior attention, and coalition energy that might otherwise have translated into faster action on the ground, where people were dying in the meantime.

Russia did not need to use a nuclear weapon. It needed only to make the question vivid enough to slow the people trying to stop it, and in that narrower objective it succeeded long enough to matter in ways that cannot be undone.

The 2025 Transition: Shaping the Opponent’s Frame

When the Trump administration took office in January 2025 and began shifting American posture toward the conflict, Moscow’s public diplomacy moved rapidly to encourage the perception that a negotiated settlement was not only possible but imminent, and that European governments resisting it were prolonging unnecessary suffering for reasons of their own. The framing took hold quickly enough that European leaders found themselves defending a policy that had been undercut by their primary security partner before any actual negotiation had begun.

This is reflexive control working at the level of alliance politics. The opponent is not being defeated. He is being guided into a position where certain choices look reasonable and others look dangerous, and the range of choices he is willing to make narrows steadily toward the range Moscow wanted him in all along. The ceasefire discussions moving through back channels and third-party mediators in 2025 and into 2026 should be read in this light. The objective is not to reach a specific settlement on specific terms. It is to move Western governments from supporting a war effort to managing a peace process, to shift the question from how to help Ukraine win to how much each party must give up, and to introduce enough uncertainty into the Western coalition that European governments begin negotiating among themselves about concessions before they have negotiated anything with Russia. That internal Western argument, conducted in public, is itself what Moscow is after. The Ukrainians watching it from the other side of the front line understand this with a clarity that does not always travel well to Western capitals.

The Limits of the Strategy

None of this means the strategy is without risk, and saying so matters.

A moyo in GO can be overextended. If the opponent invades and cuts it down before it solidifies, what looked like a strong position can collapse quickly. Russia has committed military and economic resources to Ukraine at costs that are now piling up in ways Moscow did not foresee in February 2022. The assumption that Ukraine would fold within days, that the West would split within weeks, and that the economic costs of sanctions could be absorbed through relationships with China and the Global South has been wrong on every count. The losses Russia has taken on the battlefield will shape its population and its economy for a generation. The ruble’s managed stability hides pressures that falling energy revenues are making harder to hold back.

Western adaptation has been slower than Ukraine’s supporters wanted, but it has been real. European defense spending has risen sharply across the alliance. Germany reversed a defense posture that had hardened over three decades. Poland has become one of the highest per-capita defense spenders in NATO. The weapons production base that had shrunk across the West during the long post-Cold War years of reduced competition is being rebuilt with an urgency that would have been politically impossible before February 2022.

Ukraine has not been an idle player on the board. Rather than watching Russia collect the Iran windfall undisturbed, Kyiv escalated drone strikes against Russian oil export infrastructure in March 2026, targeting terminals at Novorossiysk on the Black Sea and Primorsk and Ust-Luga on the Baltic. At its peak, Ukrainian strikes shut down approximately 40 percent of Russia’s crude oil export capacity simultaneously, the most severe supply disruption in modern Russian history. On March 31, Zelenskyy proposed an Easter energy truce, offering to halt strikes on Russian energy facilities if Moscow stopped attacking Ukraine’s power grid. Russia’s response came on April 1: more than 360 Shahed drones launched at Ukrainian territory, hitting energy infrastructure across multiple regions. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed the truce proposal, saying Moscow wanted peace, not a pause, and that Zelenskyy would eventually have to accept Russia’s terms. The exchange illustrated the board dynamic. Ukraine tried to wrest the initiative on the reduction-moves front. Russia refused to let the position simplify, kept pressure on Ukraine’s infrastructure, and absorbed the export disruption rather than negotiate on terms it had not chosen.

Ukraine has decided, at a cost measured in hundreds of thousands of lives, that the future Russia chose for them is one they will not accept. That refusal is itself a move on the board, and it is one that no amount of patient positioning can answer without the kind of direct confrontation that GO strategy is designed to avoid.

Reflexive control also depends on the adversary’s willingness to accept the picture it paints, and that willingness is not fixed. Against hesitation it works powerfully. Against resolve it works far less well, and there are governments in Europe today, in Warsaw, in Tallinn, in Helsinki, that are not hesitating, that have looked at the board and decided that the cost of clarity now is less than the cost of confusion later.

The Board Gets Larger

Policymakers who understand this framework are in a position to push back. Those who keep measuring the front line and asking who is winning the territorial battle are watching the wrong board entirely. The front line, the casualties, the delivery of weapons are important, but all of these take place on a board being shaped in ways that no military map can plot: the internal cohesion of Western alliances, the staying power of economic sanctions, the resilience of democratic institutions against interference campaigns, the capacity of publics to sustain attention on a war that has lasted longer than anyone expected. These are the dimensions on which the game is actually being played, and reading them correctly is the prerequisite for every other response.

From 2014 to today, the pattern is consistent. Russia secured strong bases first, then preserved unresolved leverage while connecting separate gains into larger claimed positions. It attacked Western cohesion rather than only the front line, shaped decisions through pressure and ambiguity rather than direct confrontation, and kept the game open, absorbing costs and continuing to maneuver, waiting for the point at which the opponent’s options narrow faster than Russia’s do.

Now the board is getting larger.

A GO player needs to read the board as it develops and recognize which openings favor him, or where he is being challenged, and especially where there may be a massive reversal. The American and Israeli military campaign against Iran in 2025 and 2026 are staring Putin in the face. There is opportunity here for him, and there is real danger.

Iran has been supplying Russia with Shahed drones since 2022, drones that have been central to the infrastructure reduction campaign against Ukraine. At peak production, Iranian factories were building several hundred Shaheds a month. In January 2025, Tehran and Moscow formalized years of deepening ties by signing a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. Then the American and Israeli strikes hit the factories. By early 2026, Iranian drone output had collapsed to single digits. The production lines that fed three winters of attacks on Ukrainian power stations, hospitals, and apartment blocks were largely destroyed. That is a stone placed directly on Russia’s supply line, and its effects are measurable: the infrastructure campaign that once drew on a seemingly inexhaustible flow of Iranian drones now runs on diminished stocks and North Korean substitutes of lower quality. In that concrete sense, the campaign against Iran accomplished something for Ukraine that years of Western deliberation about drone defense systems had not.

But honesty on this board must run in all directions. The same campaign that severed the drone pipeline also rescued Russia’s war budget. The broader effect of a Middle East in active conflict runs so strongly in Russia’s favor that the supply chain disruption barely registers against it.

Start with the money. The West built its sanctions regime on a single calculation: cut Russia’s energy revenues and you starve the war machine. By 2025 that pressure was beginning to show real results. Russian oil and gas revenues had fallen to their lowest level since 2020, down 24 percent from the year before. Western sanctions and OPEC production increases had pushed Russian crude to discounts of $10 to $15 a barrel. Russia’s Q1 2026 oil and gas revenues were expected to total roughly $16 billion, half what the same quarter produced the year before. Moscow’s 2026 budget was built on an assumed oil price of $59 per barrel, and even that was considered optimistic by most analysts. Kremlin officials were warning Putin privately that a financial crisis could arrive by summer. The National Wealth Fund, Russia’s emergency reserve, held just over $48 billion in liquid assets at the start of 2026, down from $113 billion before the invasion, and analysts at investment firm MMI calculated it could be exhausted before the end of the year.

Then Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz.

The Strait carries roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil and gas every day. Its closure sent prices above $100 a barrel in early March 2026. By mid-March, Russian Urals crude was trading at $90 a barrel, twice its February price. Russia went from selling at a steep discount to Brent before the U.S.-Israeli strikes to selling at a premium afterward. In the first fifteen days of March alone, Russia was earning approximately 372 million euros a day from oil exports, 14 percent above its February daily average. The Kyiv School of Economics calculated that depending on how long the conflict runs, Russia could receive between $45 billion and $151 billion in additional budget revenues in 2026. In a three-month scenario the additional export earnings approach $161 billion, roughly half a billion dollars every single day, more than Russia’s entire 2025 fiscal deficit. If prices hold through the year, Bloomberg estimated total oil and gas tax receipts of approximately $180 billion for 2026, compared to $101 billion in 2025. In a six-month scenario Russia could run a budget surplus and rebuild the sovereign wealth fund it has been drawing down to finance the war.

The windfall extends well beyond crude oil. Bloomberg reported on April 1 that Iran’s stranglehold on the Strait has choked off shipments of aluminum, liquefied natural gas, and fertilizers, driving aluminum prices up 12 percent and urea up nearly three-quarters since the start of the conflict. Russia is a major exporter of all three. The Iran conflict is rescuing Russia’s entire commodity export position, oil, aluminum, gas, fertilizers, at the moment when sanctions pressure had brought that position to its lowest point since 2020.

The practical consequence landed immediately. Bloomberg reported on April 3 that the Russian government has dropped plans to cut budget spending that had been under serious consideration as recently as this month. Officials had been weighing a 10 percent cut to non-sensitive spending to manage the widening deficit. Those cuts are now off the table. Russia has already earmarked $157 billion for defense in 2026. Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center senior fellow Sergey Vakulenko put it plainly: “What he was spending on the war meant he was basically pawning the country. Now, he doesn’t have to do that anymore.”³²

The West sanctioned Russian energy to starve the war machine. A conflict Russia did not start is refilling it faster than three years of sanctions drained it.

The reversal does not stop at oil prices. Indian refineries, scrambling to replace Gulf supply they could no longer get, began buying Russian crude above the Brent global benchmark. Russian oil shipments to India were on course to nearly double in March compared with February. China, already structurally dependent on Russian energy, found fresh reason to deepen that dependence as routes through the Strait became unreliable. Russia had spent years trying to persuade China to commit to the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline. A draft five-year plan mentioning new Russian pipeline construction appeared in March 2026. The Iran conflict did in weeks what years of Russian persuasion had not managed to do.

Then came the move that revealed what all of this means for the sanctions regime itself. In a phone call with Putin on March 10, Trump agreed to waive Russian oil sanctions on certain countries to ease the global shortage. With a single call, the United States handed Moscow market access the West had spent three years trying to close. The reason was plain: American domestic energy prices were rising, and the political cost of letting them rise further was higher than the political cost of easing pressure on Russia. Analysts at the Peterson Institute for International Economics noted that the crisis demonstrated again that American sanctions yield the moment energy prices threaten domestic politics, particularly ahead of elections. Every country watching that exchange drew the same conclusion: Western economic pressure is not a permanent constraint. It is a political instrument, and it bends under sufficient stress.

That conclusion is not lost on Moscow. It affects how Russia reads the staying power of every restriction the West has placed on it since 2022, not only on oil but across the entire sanctions architecture. A weapon the opponent has shown he will put down when it costs him enough is a weapon that has already lost half its force.

Beyond the financial windfall, the Iran conflict is doing something equally valuable for Russia on the internal Western board. Washington’s bandwidth is finite. Weeks spent managing escalation in the Gulf are weeks Ukraine competes for senior attention it cannot fully get. Disagreements between the United States and its European partners over how to handle Tehran reopen fractures Russia has spent years working to widen. The American political debate about simultaneous commitments in two theaters feeds the argument, already circulating in Washington, that Ukraine is someone else’s problem to carry.

And the cutting point inside the EU that Moscow has cultivated for years activated immediately. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, alone among European leaders, called on the EU to suspend sanctions on Russian energy entirely, citing the Iran-driven price spike as justification. The same structural vulnerability that delayed the fourteenth sanctions package, that leaked EU deliberations to Moscow, that made Western unity expensive at every critical moment, found fresh ammunition in a conflict Russia had nothing to do with starting. The stone placed years ago on a secondary part of the board was producing results on the main one.

In Go, when your opponent opens a fight on a secondary part of the board, the experienced player does not panic and does not immediately exploit it. He watches. He lets the fight develop. He conserves his own stones and waits to see how much of his opponent’s attention and resources the new fight consumes before deciding how to respond. The worst move is to force a resolution prematurely. The best move is often to do nothing visible at all, and let the board do the work.

Putin has been doing nothing visible about Iran, which is itself a move. He has not loudly celebrated the conflict, has not openly encouraged escalation, and has not positioned Russia as a direct party to it. He has chaired meetings on global energy markets at the Kremlin, studying the numbers. He has continued fighting in Ukraine, continued building roads and railways in occupied territory, continued pressing on the internal European board, and continued waiting. A board that is getting more complicated for the West is, by definition, getting simpler for the player who only has one fight to manage and whose war budget just got rescued by someone else’s war.

The danger is that Western governments, pulled between Ukraine and the Middle East, between the costs of supporting both and the political pressure to prioritize one, will find themselves doing neither well enough to matter. A GO player works for the multiplication of his opponent’s obligations until none of them can be met with the full weight they require.

The board is wider than it was a decade ago, and more complicated, and the opponent is being asked to respond in more places at once than he can manage without making choices about what to let go.

The world cannot afford to let Ukraine go. It’s importance on the board rises every day, and a GO master would capitalize on that.

What to Watch For

If Russia’s strategy is about controlling how decisions get made rather than how much territory gets taken, the direction of the conflict becomes easier to read, which is the first step toward countering it.

On the military side, expect continued pressure aimed at exhausting Western political will rather than seizing specific ground, and a deliberate avoidance of engagements so large and so clear that they would either end the conflict or force a unified Western response Moscow could not absorb. The Easter 2026 strikes are consistent with this: large enough to punish, destructive enough to drain Ukrainian endurance, but not large enough to change the political calculation in Western capitals. The goal is a frozen or half-frozen conflict that preserves Russian leverage while the West gradually talks itself into accepting an outcome it would have rejected in February 2022.

On the political side, expect sustained efforts to widen divisions within European and North Atlantic institutions, particularly around defense spending, the costs of sanctions, and the long-term will to keep supplying weapons. The rise of political parties across Europe that pair skepticism of Ukraine aid with broader economic grievances is not coincidental. It is the return on patient investment in the internal board, the placement of stones in positions that would only matter years later, when exhaustion set in.

The most immediate test of that investment arrives on April 19, 2026, when Bulgaria votes. If a Radev government forms in Sofia, the internal board shifts in ways that compound every other pressure described here.

Watch also for continued entrenchment in occupied territories. Every kilometer of Russian road built in Zaporizhzhia, every administrative office opened in Kherson, every railway connection completed between the Donbas and Crimea makes the board harder to reverse. Russia is converting contested space into permanent infrastructure, and infrastructure is much harder to negotiate away than lines on a map.

How the West Must Play

What this demands from Western policymakers is not simply to counter individual Russian moves, because that reactive approach is what the strategy is built to exploit. The requirement is to hold together the political, economic, and military response at the same time, and to resist the temptation to treat the avoidance of escalation as a goal in itself. Caution is not a neutral position on this board. Sustained caution, dressed up as prudence, is a concession, and on this board concessions compound.

But the board is not fixed, and the West is not without stones of its own.

In March 2025, the United States imposed 25 percent secondary tariffs on all buyers of Venezuelan oil, froze PDVSA’s assets, and took control of approximately $3 billion in Venezuelan government accounts held in American financial institutions. Venezuela holds 303 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, the largest on earth. The United States, previously tenth on that list, now exercises direct influence over the country that sits at the top of it. In a protracted great-power competition where energy reserves determine staying power, that is not a secondary move. It is a fundamental shift in the resource map. Every government calculating the balance of global energy supply, in Moscow, in Beijing, in Riyadh, now factors American leverage over Venezuelan oil into its planning. The consequences extend beyond crude. In December 2025, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned a network operating Iranian-built Mohajer-6 drones from El Libertador Air Base in Venezuela, a pipeline connecting Tehran’s military production to a foothold in the Western Hemisphere. That pipeline is now cut. A stone Russia’s allies had placed in America’s backyard has been removed from the board.

The Iran conflict carries a dual character. The drone factories that armed Russia are destroyed. But the same campaign rescued Russia’s war budget through the Strait of Hormuz closure and handed Moscow a sanctions waiver when energy prices forced the question. Moves on this board produce consequences across the entire surface. A player who does not think in whole-board terms will find his strongest move on one front creating openings on another. Ending the Iran conflict decisively would resolve both sides of that equation. A post-conflict Iran that no longer threatens the Strait removes the price spike that rescued Russia’s budget. A change of regime in Tehran, if that is where the campaign leads, eliminates the drone supply and the oil windfall simultaneously. The stone that matters most on the Iran front is not the one already placed. It is the one that finishes the sequence.

Other stones require placement now. Bulgaria votes on April 19, sixteen days from today. A pro-Russian government in Sofia would mean a second permanent veto inside the EU, the loss of Ukraine’s essential 155mm shell supply, and a fracture in NATO’s Black Sea flank. GO rewards the player who reads the board early and places his stones before the opponent’s position solidifies. The Western response to this cannot be a statement of concern issued after the results come in. It requires immediate and visible engagement: diplomatic weight applied now, support for pro-European civil society deployed this week, clear public messaging from Brussels and Washington that Bulgaria’s euro-Atlantic orientation is a priority Western governments will invest in defending. The alternative is to watch another election produce an outcome that compounds every pressure on this board, and then issue a communique about democratic values after it is too late to affect anything.²⁴

These three fronts, Venezuela, Iran, and Bulgaria, are not separate problems. They are positions on the same board. The energy reserves in Venezuela and the oil windfall flowing through the Strait and the ammunition factories in Bulgaria and the shell supply reaching Ukraine’s front lines are connected the way GO stones are connected: by the influence they project across the spaces between them. A player who sees them as isolated crises will respond to each one separately and too late. A player who sees the board will recognize that the energy front and the supply front and the political front are a single contest, and that stones placed on one affect the position on all the others.

Beyond these three fronts, the broader requirements are structural. Western decision-makers must learn to recognize reflexive control and subject their own reasoning to scrutiny. When a course of action appears “rational” based on information flowing through Russian channels, that apparent rationality should itself be questioned. Predictability in Western responses is a gift to an opponent who builds his strategy around modeling the other side’s behavior.

Alliance architecture requires active maintenance, not crisis-by-crisis improvisation. A system built on unanimity is only as strong as its most susceptible member, and Russia has demonstrated a sustained capacity to identify and cultivate susceptible members over timelines that outlast any single electoral cycle. The response must be structural: mechanisms that reduce the ability of any single member to hold the entire formation hostage, combined with sustained investment in the electoral and institutional resilience of every member state that Russian influence operations have targeted.

And patience must be matched with patience. GO rewards long-term thinking. European defense commitments must extend to 2032 and beyond. Quick fixes and electoral-cycle timelines play into Putin’s calculation that Western resolve will fracture before Russian endurance does. But Russia is stretched. Its casualty rates, its 23 percent interest rates, its dependence on North Korean ammunition and depleted Iranian drone stocks all indicate positions extended beyond comfortable sustainability. The board is not lost. But it will be lost if the West continues playing it one crisis at a time, reacting to Russian moves rather than placing stones of its own.

The war in Ukraine is real in ways that cannot be reduced to strategy. Every delay in a weapons decision, every episode of alliance friction, every week that the conflict is managed rather than resolved falls on someone in Ukraine, in a city that may or may not still be standing, in a family that is or is not still intact.

GO mastery does not guarantee victory. It provides a framework that can fail when applied poorly, when resources prove insufficient, or when opponents understand and counter its logic. Putin has made grievous errors, most notably his catastrophic misjudgment of Ukrainian resistance and Western unity in 2022. His maximalist objectives contradict the pragmatic coexistence that GO strategy ultimately requires. His multi-front expansion may prove unsustainable as resource constraints compound across too many simultaneous conflicts.

Understanding Putin’s strategic framework remains essential for effective response. A chess player facing a GO master who refuses to recognize the nature of the game he is playing will consistently misread his opponent’s moves, fail to anticipate his positioning, and respond with inappropriate tactics. The West has made this error repeatedly since 2008, treating Russian actions as puzzling deviations from rational behavior rather than expressions of coherent alternative strategy.

GO has no checkmate, no sudden victory that ends the game. Players count territory when both players agree to stop playing. In this geopolitical game, neither side has yet agreed to stop. The player who sees the board whole, who maintains strategic patience while exploiting opponent overextension, will control more space when the counting finally comes.

What Russia has been playing is something older than chess, more patient, and more concerned with the shape of the whole board than with the outcome of any single battle. The West has spent a quarter century watching the wrong game. The people paying for that confusion are not in Washington or Brussels.

They are in Ukraine.

Dale Armstrong is the Director of the Armada Network, an American non-profit with more than 30 years of experience in Ukraine.

Notes

1. Quoted in “Mearsheimer: Rigor or Reaction?” Quillette, February 15, 2023. ↩
2. Paul Miller, “I Predicted Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine,” RAND Corporation Commentary, March 10, 2014. ↩
3. Eliot Cohen and Phillips O’Brien, discussed in “Why Did the Experts Fail to Predict Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine?” The National Interest, December 11, 2024. ↩
4. Cited in “Why Many Underestimated Russia’s Invasion Risk,” War on the Rocks, December 2025. ↩
5. Lawrence Freedman, quoted in “How Did Everybody Get The Ukraine Invasion Predictions So Wrong?” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, February 17, 2023. ↩
6. Josep Borrell, quoted in Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, February 17, 2023. ↩
7. “Nine Things Western Analysts Got Wrong About Russia and Its Invasion of Ukraine,” Jamestown Foundation, March 6, 2024. ↩
8. “As Putin eyes sure reelection, Russia’s economy defies sanctions, critics,” Al Jazeera, March 16, 2024. ↩
9. “The Russian economy in 2025: Between stagnation and militarization,” Atlantic Council, December 2025. ↩
10. “Russia’s Economic Gamble: The Hidden Costs of War-Driven Growth,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, December 2024. ↩
11. “Russia-Ukraine War: What the West Gets Wrong About Russian President Vladimir Putin,” Foreign Policy, June 1, 2022. ↩
12. Taras Kuzio, “How Western Experts Got the Ukraine War So Wrong,” Geopolitical Monitor, August 22, 2025. ↩
13. Vladimir Lefebvre, The Algebra of Conscience: A Comparative Analysis of Western and Soviet Ethical Systems (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing, 1982). See also Timothy Thomas, “Russia’s Reflexive Control Theory and the Military,” Journal of Slavic Military Studies 17, no. 2 (2004): 237-256. ↩
14. For comprehensive treatment of reflexive control in Soviet and Russian military thought, see Diane Chotikul, “The Soviet Theory of Reflexive Control in Historical and Psychocultural Perspective: A Preliminary Study,” Naval Postgraduate School, July 1986; and Maria Pearson, “Reflexive Control: A Framework for Understanding Russian Influence Operations,” George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, 2021. ↩
15. “Putin lauds the strength of Russia’s economy. Others see a mirage,” CNN, January 26, 2025. ↩
16. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, December 2024. ↩
17. Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, “Europe’s Gas Crisis: Russian Energy Politics,” 2022; Atlantic Council analysis of Russian energy weaponization, 2022. ↩
18. Wiley Online Library, “Long-run impacts of the conflict in Ukraine on grain imports and prices in Africa,” African Development Review, March 2024. ↩
19. Dimitar Bechev, “Russia’s Influence in Bulgaria,” New Direction, 2018; Bulgaria’s Dossier Commission (ComDos), established by the 2006 Access to Former State Security Files Act, disclosed thousands of former collaborators including politicians, diplomats, and journalists; Jordan Baev and Stoycho Stoyanov, “Active and Sharp Measures: Cooperation between the Soviet KGB and Bulgarian State Security,” Journal of Cold War Studies 23, no. 4 (2021). ↩
20. CSIS, “Russian attacks in Europe nearly tripled,” 2024; Romanian Constitutional Court decision annulling presidential election, December 6, 2024. ↩
21. General Gerasimov statement, December 2024; European Parliament analysis of Russian military presence in Africa and Latin America, 2024. ↩↩
22. Fair Trials, “One in Five: How Interpol is used to harass and persecute,” 2024; U.S. Helsinki Commission testimony on Russian abuse of Interpol mechanisms, 2022. ↩↩
23. CSIS infrastructure attack documentation, 2024; IISS report on 246 percent increase in European critical infrastructure attacks, 2024. ↩↩
24. “What Putin Fears Most,” Journal of Democracy, March 2024. ↩
25. Atlantic Council, assessment of the 2008 Georgia conflict and its implications for subsequent Russian military operations. ↩
26. Makram El-Shagi and Kirill Zhol, “Crimea and Punishment: The Impact of Sanctions on Russian and European Economies,” Baltic Journal of Economics 19, no. 1 (2019); Atlantic Council, “The Impact of Western Sanctions on Russia,” 2023, estimating Russia forewent $479 billion in international credits due to post-2014 sanctions. ↩↩
27. Washington Institute for Near East Policy, assessment of Russian intervention in Syria. ↩
28. Power of Siberia pipeline economics and Chinese investment decline. Chinese investment in Russia fell 92.3 percent between 2013 and 2018 per MERICS analysis. ↩
29. Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS), assessment of Russia-China trade dependency. Bilateral trade reached $245 billion in 2024. ↩
30. Territorial data from DeepState OSINT group via Russia Matters (Harvard Kennedy School), “Russia-Ukraine War Report Card,” December 23, 2025, reporting 176 square miles average monthly Russian advance and 19.2 percent of Ukrainian territory occupied; casualty estimate of 790,000+ Russian killed or wounded per General Christopher Cavoli, SACEUR, April 2025. ↩
31. Reuters investigation published March 2026, confirming more than 2,500 kilometers of roads and rail completed or upgraded in occupied Ukrainian territories. ↩
32. Sergey Vakulenko, Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, quoted in Bloomberg, April 3, 2026. ↩