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| PARIS — Speaking in what he called “the language of Goethe, Schiller and Kant,” picked up during his time as a KGB officer in Dresden, Germany, President Vladimir Putin of Russia addressed the German Parliament on Sept. 25, 2001. “Russia is a friendly European nation,” he declared. “Stable peace on the continent is a paramount goal for our nation.” | 巴黎——2001年9月25日，俄罗斯总统普京在德国议会用德语发表讲话。他在德国德累斯顿担任克格勃官员期间学会了德语，他称之为“歌德、席勒和康德的语言”。“俄罗斯是一个友好的欧洲国家，”他宣称。“欧洲大陆的稳定和平是我们国家的首要目标。” |
| The Russian leader, elected the previous year at the age of 47 after a meteoric rise from obscurity, went on to describe “democratic rights and freedoms” as the “key goal of Russia’s domestic policy.” Members of the Bundestag gave a standing ovation. | 普京在之前一年被选举为总统，时年47岁，他从一个无名小卒迅速崛起，最终成为俄罗斯领导人。他接下来表示“民主权利和自由”是“俄罗斯国内政策的关键目标”。联邦议院议员起立鼓掌。 |
| Norbert Röttgen, a center-right representative who headed the Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee for several years, was among those who rose to their feet. “Putin captured us,” he said. “The voice was quite soft, in German, a voice that tempts you to believe what is said to you. We had some reason to think there was a viable perspective of togetherness.” | 在起立的议员中，就有曾任议会外交事务委员会主席多年的中右翼代表诺伯特·罗特根。“普京抓住了我们的心，”他说。“他用很温和的声音说德语，这样的声音诱使你相信他对你说的话。我们有理由认为和睦相处的前景是可以实现的。” |
| Today, all togetherness shredded, Ukraine burns, bludgeoned by the invading army Putin sent to prove his conviction that Ukrainian nationhood is a myth. More than 3.7 million Ukrainians are refugees; the dead mount up in a month-old war; and that purring voice of Putin has morphed into the angry rant of a hunched man dismissing as “scum and traitors” any Russian who resists the violence of his tightening dictatorship. | 今天，所有的和睦都被撕碎，乌克兰战火纷飞，普京派军队入侵来证明他的信念——乌克兰这个国家并不存在。超过370万乌克兰人成为难民；战争已长达一月之久，伤亡越来越多；普京那温和的声音已经变成了一个弓着背的男人的愤怒咆哮，任何反抗他日益严酷的独裁统治暴力的俄罗斯人都被他斥为“败类和叛徒”。 |
| His opponents will meet an ugly fate, Putin vowed this month, grimacing as his planned blitzkrieg in Ukraine stalled. True Russians, he said, would “spit them out like a gnat that accidentally flew into their mouths” and so achieve “a necessary self-purification of society.” | 普京在乌克兰的闪电战计划停滞不前，他在本月咬牙切齿地发誓，他的对手将会落得难看下场。他说，真正的俄罗斯人会像“吐出不小心飞进嘴里的虫子那样”，实现“必要的社会自我净化”。 |
| This was less the language of Kant than of fascist nationalist exaltation laced with Putin’s hardscrabble, brawling St. Petersburg youth. | 这与其说是康德的语言，不如说是法西斯民族主义的兴奋与普京穷困好斗的圣彼得堡青年时代的交织。 |
| Between these voices of reason and incitation, between these two seemingly different men, lie 22 years of power and five United States presidents. As China rose, as the U.S. fought and lost its forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as technology networked the world, a Russian enigma took form in the Kremlin. | 从理性的声音到煽动的声音，从最初的样子到判若两人，中间经历了22年的大权在握以及五位美国总统。随着中国的崛起，随着美国在伊拉克和阿富汗没完没了的战争中失利，随着技术将世界联成一体，一个俄罗斯谜团在克里姆林宫里成型。 |
| Did the U.S. and its allies, through excess of optimism or naiveté, simply get Putin wrong from the outset? Or was he transformed over time into the revanchist warmonger of today? | 美国及其盟友是不是因为过于乐观或过于天真，从一开始就误读了普京？还是说，随着时间的推移，他变成了今天的复仇主义好战分子？ |
| Putin is an enigma, but he is also the most public of figures. Seen from the perspective of his reckless gamble in Ukraine, a picture emerges of a man who seized on almost every move by the West as a slight against Russia — and perhaps also himself. As the grievances mounted, the distinction blurred. In effect, he became the state, he merged with Russia, their fates fused in an increasingly Messianic vision of restored imperial glory. | 普京是个谜，但他也是最知名的公众人物。透过他在乌克兰的鲁莽赌博，我们看到的是一个人几乎将西方的一举一动都看作是对俄罗斯——也许还有对他自己——的轻视。随着不满情绪的增加，个人与国家的区别变得模糊。实际上，他成为了国家，他与俄罗斯融合，他们的命运逐渐融合在一个救世主式的恢复帝国荣耀的愿景中。 |
| From the Ashes of Empire | 帝国灰烬中重生 |
| “The temptation of the West for Putin was, I think, chiefly that he saw it as instrumental to building a great Russia,” said Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state who met several times with Putin during the first phase of his rule. “He was always obsessed with the 25 million Russians trapped outside Mother Russia by the breakup of the Soviet Union. Again and again he raised this. That is why, for him, the end of the Soviet empire was the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century.” | “我认为，西方对普京的诱惑主要在于，他认为它有助于建设一个伟大的俄罗斯，”在普京执政的第一阶段与他多次会面的前国务卿康多莉扎·赖斯说。“他总是执着于因苏联解体而被困在俄罗斯祖国母亲之外的2500万俄罗斯人。他一次又一次地提起这件事。这就是为什么对他而言，苏联帝国的终结是20世纪最大的灾难。” |
| But if irredentist resentment lurked, alongside a Soviet spy’s suspicion of the U.S., Putin had other initial priorities. He was a patriotic servant of the state. The post-communist Russia of the 1990s, led by Boris Yeltsin, the country’s first freely elected leader, had sundered. | 但是，如果普京除了作为前苏联间谍对美国有着怀疑之外，还潜伏着领土收复主义的怨恨，那么他还有其他最初的优先事项。他是国家的爱国公仆。由该国第一位自由选举产生的领导人鲍里斯·叶利钦领导的1990年代后共产主义俄罗斯已不复存在。 |
| In 1993, Yeltsin ordered the Parliament shelled to put down an insurgency; 147 people were killed. The West had to provide Russia with humanitarian aid, so dire was its economic collapse, so pervasive its extreme poverty, as large swaths of industry were sold off for a song to an emergent class of oligarchs. All this, to Putin, represented mayhem. | 1993年，叶利钦下令炮击议会大楼以平息叛乱；147人丧生。西方不得不向俄罗斯提供人道主义援助，它的经济崩溃是如此可怕，它的极端贫困如此普遍，大片的工业贱价出售给了新兴寡头阶层。对普京来说，这一切都代表着混乱。 |
| “He hated what happened to Russia, hated the idea the West had to help it,” said Christoph Heusgen, the chief diplomatic adviser to former Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany between 2005 and 2017. Putin’s first political manifesto for the 2000 presidential campaign was all about reversing Western efforts to transfer power from the state to the marketplace. | “他憎恨俄罗斯的遭遇，憎恨不得不让西方予以帮助，”2005年至2017年间德国前总理安格拉·默克尔的首席外交顾问克里斯托夫·赫斯根说。普京为2000年总统竞选所发表的第一份政治宣言就是要扭转西方将权力从国家转移到市场的努力。 |
| The new president would work with the oligarchs created by chaotic, free-market, crony capitalism — so long as they showed absolute fealty. Failing that, they would be expunged. If this was democracy, it was “sovereign democracy,” a phrase embraced by Putin’s top political strategists, stress on the first word. | 新总统将与因混乱、自由市场、裙带资本主义而生的寡头合作——只要他们表现出绝对的忠诚。否则，他们将被清除。如果这是民主，那就是“主权民主”，这是普京的高级政治战略家采用的一个词，强调的是前半部分。 |
| Marked, to some degree, by his home city of St. Petersburg, built by Peter the Great in the early 18th century as a “window to Europe,” and by his initial political experience there from 1991 working in the mayor’s office to attract foreign investment, Putin does appear to have been guardedly open to the West early in his rule. | 普京是圣彼得堡人，那是彼得大帝在18世纪初建造的“通往欧洲的窗口”，从1991年起，他在那里的市长办公室负责吸引外资的工作，从这些来看，普京在他执政初期似乎确实对西方保持谨慎的开放态度。 |
| He mentioned the possibility of Russian membership of NATO to former President Bill Clinton in 2000, an idea that never went anywhere. He maintained a Russian partnership agreement signed with the European Union in 1994. A NATO-Russia Council was established in 2002. Petersburg man vied with Homo Sovieticus. | 他在2000年向前总统比尔·克林顿提出了让俄罗斯成为北约成员国的可能性，但这个想法最终不了了之。他维持了1994年与欧盟签署的俄罗斯伙伴关系协议。2002年北约-俄罗斯委员会成立。彼得堡人与苏维埃人两个身份相互拉扯。 |
| This was a delicate balancing act, for which the disciplined Putin was prepared. “You should never lose control,” he told American movie director Oliver Stone in “The Putin Interviews,” a 2017 documentary. | 这是一个微妙的平衡，作风严谨的普京为此做好了准备。“你永远都不应该失控，”他在2017年的纪录片《普京访谈录》中告诉美国电影导演奥利弗·斯通。 |
| “You must understand, he is from the KGB, lying is his profession, it is not a sin,” said Sylvie Bermann, the French ambassador in Moscow from 2017 to 2020. | “你必须明白，他是克格勃出身，撒谎是他的职业，而不是罪过，”2017年至2020年担任法国驻莫斯科大使的西尔维·伯曼说。 |
| A few months before the Bundestag speech, Putin famously won over former President George W. Bush, who, after their first meeting in June 2001, said he had looked into the Russian president’s eyes and found him “very straightforward and trustworthy.” Yeltsin, similarly swayed, anointed Putin as his successor just three years after he arrived in Moscow in 1996. | 在联邦议院演讲的几个月前，普京众所周知地赢得了美国前总统乔治·W·布什的支持，布什总统在2001年6月与他第一次会面后表示，他看着这位俄罗斯总统的眼睛，发现他“非常直率且值得信赖”。叶利钦也同样受到影响，在普京于1996年到莫斯科任职仅三年后就任命他为继任者。 |
| An Authoritarian’s Rise | 威权主义者的崛起 |
| Born in 1952 in a city then called Leningrad, Putin grew up in the shadow of the Soviets’ war with Nazi Germany. The immense sacrifices of the Red Army in defeating Nazism were not abstract but palpable within his modest family. Putin learned young that, as he put it, “the weak get beat.” | 普京生于1952年，他出生的城市在当时的名字是列宁格勒，他在苏联与纳粹德国战争的阴影下长大。苏联红军在击败纳粹的战争中付出的巨大牺牲对他所在的这个普通家庭而言不是一个抽象概念，而是切实的感受。普京年轻时就明白——正如他所说的那样——“弱者就会挨打”。 |
| “The West did not take sufficient account of the strength of Soviet myth, military sacrifice and revanchism in him,” said Michel Eltchaninoff, the French author of “Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin,” whose grandparents were all Russian. “He believes deeply that Russian man is prepared to sacrifice himself for an idea, whereas Western man likes success and comfort.” | “西方没有充分考虑到苏联神话、军人牺牲和复仇带给他的力量，”祖父母都是俄罗斯人的法国作家米歇尔·埃尔查尼诺夫说。“他深信俄罗斯人愿意为一个理念牺牲自己，而西方人则喜欢成功和舒适。” |
| Putin brought a measure of that comfort to Russia in the first eight years of his presidency. The economy galloped ahead, foreign investment poured in. | 在担任总统的头八年里，普京给俄罗斯带来了一定程度的舒适。经济飞速发展，外资涌入。 |
| The problem for Putin was that to diversify an economy, the rule of law helps. He had studied law at St. Petersburg University and claimed to respect it. In fact, power proved to be his lodestone. | 普京面临的问题是，经济多样化需要法治的帮助。他曾在圣彼得堡大学学习法律，并声称尊重法律。事实证明，权力才是他的磁石。 |
| Timothy Snyder, a prominent historian of fascism, put it this way: “Having toyed with an authoritarian rule-of-law state, he simply become the oligarch-in-chief and turned the state into the enforcer mechanism of his oligarchical clan.” | 著名法西斯历史学家蒂莫西·斯奈德有这样的描述：“将一个威权主义的法治国家玩弄于股掌之间后，他干脆变成首席寡头，把国家变成了他这个寡头氏族的执行机制。” |
| Still, the biggest country on Earth needed more than economic recovery to stand tall once more. Putin had been formed in a Soviet world that held that Russia was not a great power unless it dominated its neighbors. Rumblings at the country’s doorstep challenged that doctrine. | 尽管如此，地球上最大的国家想要再次屹立不倒，需要的不仅仅是经济复苏。普京成长在一个苏联世界中，这个世界认为，只有成为周围邻国的统治者，俄罗斯才称得上是大国。但邻国传来的动静挑战了这种理念。 |
| In November 2003, the Rose Revolution in Georgia set that country firmly on a Western course. In 2004 — the year of NATO’s second post-Cold War expansion, which brought in Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia — massive street protests, known as the Orange Revolution, erupted in Ukraine. They, too, stemmed from a rejection of Moscow and the embrace of a Western future. | 2003年11月，格鲁吉亚的玫瑰革命使该国坚定地走上了西方的道路。2004年，北约在冷战后第二次扩张，纳入了爱沙尼亚、立陶宛、拉脱维亚、保加利亚、罗马尼亚、斯洛伐克和斯洛文尼亚。在那一年，乌克兰爆发了被称为橙色革命的大规模街头抗议活动。这些抗议也源于对莫斯科的拒绝，并想要拥有西方那样的未来。 |
| Putin’s turn from cooperation with the West to confrontation began. It would be slow but the general direction was set. | 普京与西方从合作开始转向对抗。这会是个漫长的过程，但总体方向已经确定。 |
| A Clash With the West | 与西方的冲突 |
| From 2004 onward, a distinct hardening of Putin’s Russia became evident. | 从2004年起，普京领导的俄罗斯明显变得强硬。 |
| The president scrapped elections for regional governors in late 2004, turning them into Kremlin appointees. Russian TV increasingly looked like Soviet TV in its undiluted propaganda. | 普京总统在2004年底取消了地区州长的选举，改为由克里姆林宫指定。在纯粹的宣传运动中，俄罗斯电视台越来越像苏联电视台。 |
| Although Putin has portrayed a West-leaning Ukraine as a threat to Russian security, it was more immediately a threat to Putin’s authoritarian system itself. Radek Sikorski, the former Polish foreign minister, said: “Putin is of course right that a democratic Ukraine integrated with Europe and successful is a mortal threat to Putinism. That, more than NATO membership, is the issue.” | 尽管普京将乌克兰向西方靠拢描述为对俄罗斯安全的威胁，但它更直接地是对普京威权体制本身的威胁。波兰前外交部长拉德克·西科尔斯基说：“一个民主制的乌克兰与欧洲融合并取得成功是对普京主义的致命威胁，在这一点上，普京当然是正确的。比起是否成为北约成员国，这才是问题所在。” |
| The Russian president does not take well to mortal threats, real or imagined. If anyone had doubted Putin’s ruthlessness, they stood corrected by 2006. His loathing of weakness dictated a proclivity for violence. Yet Western democracies were slow to absorb this basic lesson. | 这位俄罗斯总统不喜欢致命威胁，无论是真实的还是想象的。如果有人怀疑普京是否真的冷酷无情，2006年证实了他们想错了。普京对软弱的厌恶决定了他的暴力倾向。然而，西方民主国家迟迟没能吸取这一基本教训。 |
| They needed Russia, and not only for its oil and gas. The Russian president was an important potential ally in what came to be called the global war on terror. It meshed with his own war in Chechnya and with a tendency to see himself as part of a civilizational battle on behalf of Christianity. | 它们需要俄罗斯，不只是因为它的石油和天然气。这位俄罗斯总统是后来被称为全球反恐战争的重要潜在盟友。这正好符合他自己在车臣的战争，以及认为自己在战争中代表基督教文明的倾向。 |
| But Putin was far less comfortable with Bush’s “freedom agenda,” announced in his second inaugural of January 2005, a commitment to promote democracy across the world in pursuit of a neoconservative vision. | 但普京对布什在2005年1月的第二次就职典礼上宣布的“自由议程”并不满意，该议程承诺在世界范围内促进民主以追求新保守主义的愿景。 |
| Arriving in Moscow as the U.S. ambassador in 2005, William Burns, now the CIA director, sent a sober cable, all post-Cold War optimism dispelled. “Russia is too big, too proud, and too self-conscious of its own history to fit neatly into a ‘Europe whole and free,’” he wrote. | 2005年作为美国大使抵达莫斯科后，现任中央情报局局长的威廉·伯恩斯发出了一份严肃的电报，冷战后的所有乐观情绪都烟消云散。“俄罗斯太大了，太骄傲了，对自己的历史太在意了，无法适当地融入一个‘完整而自由的欧洲’，”他写道。 |
| When François Hollande, the former French president, met Putin several years later, he was surprised to find him referring to Americans as “Yankees” — and in scathing terms. These Yankees had “humiliated us, put us in second position,” Putin told him. | 几年后，当法国前总统弗朗索瓦·奥朗德会见普京时，他惊讶地发现普京称美国人为“美国佬”——而且用的是批评的语气。普京告诉他，这些美国佬“羞辱了我们，把我们放在第二位”。 |
| These grudges came to a head in Putin’s ferocious speech in 2007 to the Munich Security Conference. “One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way,” he declared to a shocked audience. A “unipolar world” had been imposed after the Cold War with “one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision-making.” | 2007年，普京在慕尼黑安全会议上发表了激烈的演讲，令这种怨恨达到了顶点。“一个国家，当然，首先是美国，已经在各个方面越过了它的国界，”他向震惊的听众宣告。一个“单极世界”被强加给冷战结束后的世界，带来“单一权力中心，单一力量中心，单一决策中心”。 |
| The result was a world “in which there is one master, one sovereign, and at the end of the day this is pernicious.” More than pernicious, it was “extremely dangerous,” resulting “in the fact that nobody feels safe.” | 其结果是一个“只有一个主人，一个主权者的世界，到头来这是有害的”。不仅有害，而且“极其危险”，导致“人人自危”。 |
| The Threat of NATO Expansion | 北约扩张的威胁 |
| After the Munich speech, Germany still had hopes for Putin. Merkel, raised in East Germany, a Russian speaker, had formed a relationship with him. “There was an affinity,” said Heusgen. “An understanding.” | 慕尼黑演讲之后，德国仍然对普京抱有希望。默克尔在东德长大，说俄语，与他建立了关系。“他们之间有一种亲切感，”海斯根说。“一种理解”。 |
| Working with Putin could not mean dictating to him, however. “We deeply believed it would not be good to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO,” Heusgen said. “They would bring instability.” Article 10 of the NATO Treaty, as Heusgen noted, says any new member must be in a position to “contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area.” Just how the two contested countries would do that was unclear to Merkel. | 然而，与普京合作并不意味着能对他发号施令。“我们深信，让格鲁吉亚和乌克兰加入北约不是什么好事，”海斯根说。“它们会带来不稳定。”海斯根说指出，《北约条约》第十条规定，任何新成员国都必须能够“为北大西洋地区的安全作出贡献”。默克尔不确定这两个受到争议的国家如何能够做到这一点。 |
| The U.S., however, with the Bush presidency in its last year, was in no mood to compromise. Bush wanted a “membership action plan,” or MAP, for Ukraine and Georgia, a specific commitment to bringing the two countries into the alliance, to be announced at the April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania. | 但是，随着布什总统进入任期的最后一年，美国没有心情做出妥协。布什总统希望在2008年4月在罗马尼亚布加勒斯特举行的北约峰会上宣布乌克兰和格鲁吉亚的“成员国行动计划”，即让两国加入北约的具体承诺。 |
| Burns, as ambassador, was opposed. In a then-classified message to Rice, he wrote: “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin)." | 作为大使的伯恩斯对此表示反对。在当时发给赖斯的密电中，他写道：“乌克兰加入北约是俄罗斯精英阶层（不仅仅是普京）所有红线中最亮的一条。” |
| Already, in February 2008, the U.S. and many of its allies had recognized the independence of Kosovo from Serbia, a unilateral declaration rejected as illegal by Russia and seen as an affront to a fellow Slav nation. | 2008年2月，美国及其许多盟国已经承认科索沃从塞尔维亚独立，俄罗斯拒绝承认这一单方面主张，称其为非法，并认为这是对另一个斯拉夫民族的侮辱。 |
| France joined Germany in Bucharest in opposing the MAP for Georgia and Ukraine. | 在布加勒斯特，法国和德国一起反对格鲁吉亚和乌克兰加入北约的计划。 |
| The compromise was messy. The NATO leaders’ declaration said that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO.” But it stopped short of endorsing an action plan that would make such membership possible. Ukraine and Georgia were left with an empty promise while Russia was at once angered and offered a glimpse of a division it could later exploit. | 最终达成的妥协不明不白。北约领导人的声明说，乌克兰和格鲁吉亚“将成为北约成员”。但它没有批准一项使这种成员资格成为可能的行动计划。乌克兰和格鲁吉亚只得到一个空洞的承诺，而俄罗斯立刻被激怒了，并看到了它日后可以利用的分歧。 |
| Putin came to Bucharest and delivered what Rice described as an “emotional speech,” suggesting Ukraine was a made-up country, noting the presence of 17 million Russians there, and calling Kyiv the mother of all Russian cities — a claim that would develop into an obsession. | 普京在布加勒斯特发表了被赖斯形容为“极为情绪化的讲话”，暗示乌克兰是一个虚构的国家，指出该国有1700万俄罗斯人，并称基辅是俄罗斯所有城市之母——这种说法后来发展成了他的一个执念。 |
| Us Versus Them | 针锋相对 |
| On May 7, 2012, as a 30-gun salute echoed over Moscow and riot police officers in camouflage rounded up protesters, Putin returned to the Russian presidency. Bristling and increasingly convinced of Western perfidy and decadence, he was in many respects a changed man. | 2012年5月7日，随着30响礼炮在莫斯科上空回响，身着迷彩服的防暴警察围捕抗议者，普京再次回到俄罗斯总统的位置上。他在许多方面都已变成一个不同的人，日益确信西方的背信弃义和堕落，并且心怀愤怒。 |
| The outbreak of large street protests five months earlier, with marchers bearing signs that said “Putin is a thief,” had cemented his conviction that the U.S. was determined to bring a color revolution to Russia. | 五个月前，俄罗斯爆发了大规模街头抗议活动，游行者举着写有“普京是小偷”的标语，这使他更加确信美国决心给俄罗斯带来一场颜色革命。 |
| Putin accused then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of being the primary instigator. | 普京指责时任国务卿希拉里·克林顿是主要的煽动者。 |
| Still, the idea that Putin posed any serious threat to U.S. interests was largely dismissed in a Washington focused on defeating al-Qaida. | 尽管如此，华盛顿当时专注于击败基地组织，有关普京对美国利益构成严重威胁的说法基本上没有受到重视。 |
| Russia, under U.S. pressure, had abstained in a 2011 United Nations Security Council vote for military intervention in Libya, which authorized “all necessary measures” to protect civilians. When this mission, in Putin’s perception, morphed into the pursuit of the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi, who was killed by Libyan forces, the Russian president was furious. This was yet further confirmation of America’s international lawlessness. | 2011年，在美国的压力下，俄罗斯在联合国安理会军事干预利比亚的投票中投了弃权票。该决议授权采取“一切必要措施”保护平民。在普京看来，这一任务演变成了推翻后来被利比亚军队杀死的穆阿迈尔·卡扎菲，他感到非常愤怒，认为这进一步证实了美国在国际上的无法无天。 |
| Something else was at work. “He was haunted by the brutal takeout of Gadhafi,” said Mark Medish, who was senior director for Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian affairs at the National Security Council during the Clinton presidency. | 还有别的东西在起作用。“干掉卡扎菲的残酷行动困扰着他，”克林顿总统任内担任国家安全委员会俄罗斯、乌克兰和欧亚事务高级主管的马克·梅迪什说。 |
| Michel Duclos, a former French ambassador to Syria and now a special adviser to the Institut Montaigne think tank in Paris, places Putin’s definitive “choice of repolarization” in 2012. “He had become convinced that the West was in decline after the 2008 financial crisis,” Duclos said. “The way forward now was confrontation.” | 前法国驻叙利亚大使、现为巴黎蒙田研究所智库特别顾问的米歇尔·杜克洛认为，普京最终“选择两极再分化”是在2012年。“他已经确信，西方在2008年金融危机之后正在衰落，”杜克洛说。“现在的出路是对抗。” |
| When Putin traveled to Kyiv in July 2013, on a visit to mark the 1,025th anniversary of the conversion to Christianity of Prince Vladimir of the Kyivan Rus, he vowed to protect “our common Fatherland, Great Rus.” | 2013年7月，普京前往基辅，纪念基辅罗斯的弗拉基米尔王子皈依基督教1025周年，他誓言要保护“我们共同的祖国，大罗斯”。 |
| A Leader Emboldened | 有恃无恐的领袖 |
| The 22-year arc of Putin’s exercise of power is in many ways a study of growing audacity. Intent at first at restoring order in Russia and gaining international respect, he became convinced that a Russia rich in oil revenue and new high-tech weaponry could strut the world, deploy military force and meet scant resistance. | 普京行使权力的22年历程在很多方面都显示出他是如何变得越来越大胆。起初，他的目的是恢复俄罗斯的秩序，赢得国际社会的尊重，后来他开始相信，一个拥有丰富石油收入和高科技武器的俄罗斯可以昂首阔步地站在世界前沿，部署军事力量，并且几乎不会遇到抵抗。 |
| If Putin was, as he now seemed to believe, the personification of Russia’s mystical great-power destiny, all constraints were off. | 如果普京像他现在似乎相信的那样，象征着神秘的俄罗斯大国命运，那么所有的限制都不存在了。 |
| Ukraine, by ousting its Moscow-backed leader in a bloody popular uprising in February 2014, and so de facto rejecting Putin’s multibillion-dollar blandishments to join his Eurasian Union rather than pursue an association agreement with the EU, committed the unpardonable. This, for Putin, was, he insisted, a U.S.-backed “coup.” | 2014年2月，乌克兰在一场血腥的民众起义中推翻了莫斯科支持的领导人，从而实际上拒绝了普京数十亿美元的利诱，拒绝加入他的欧亚联盟，转而寻求与欧盟达成联合协议，这对普京来说是犯下了不可原谅的罪行。普京坚称，这是美国支持的“政变”。 |
| Putin’s annexation of Crimea and orchestration of the military conflict in eastern Ukraine that created two Russian-backed breakaway regions followed. | 随后，普京吞并克里米亚，精心策划了乌克兰东部的军事冲突，形成了两个由俄罗斯支持的分离地区。 |
| Two decades earlier, in 1994, Russia had signed an agreement known as the Budapest Memorandum, under which Ukraine gave up its vast nuclear arsenal in exchange for a promise of respect for its sovereignty and existing borders. But Putin had no interest in that commitment. | 20年前，即1994年，俄罗斯签署了一项名为《布达佩斯备忘录》的协议。根据该协议，乌克兰放弃了其庞大的核武库，以换取尊重其主权和现有边界的承诺。但普京对这一承诺毫无兴趣。 |
| Heusgen said a breaking point for Merkel came when she asked Putin about the “little green men” — masked Russian soldiers — who appeared in Crimea before the Russian annexation in March 2014. “I have nothing to do with them,” Putin responded, unconvincingly. | 海斯根说，当默克尔向普京问起2014年3月俄罗斯吞并克里米亚之前出现的“小绿人”——蒙面的俄罗斯士兵，普京做出了毫无说服力的回答：“我和他们没有任何关系。”这成了默克尔的一个转折性时刻。 |
| “He lied to her — lies, lies, lies,” Heusgen said. “From then on, she was much more skeptical about Mr. Putin.” | “他对她说谎——谎言，谎言，谎言，”海斯根说。“从那以后，她对普京更加怀疑了。” |
| The U.S. and most of Europe — less so the states closest to Russia — glided on in the seldom-questioned belief that the Russian threat, while growing, was contained; that Putin was a rational man whose use of force involved serious cost-benefit analysis; and that European peace was assured. | 美国和大多数欧洲国家继续相信——而那些与俄罗斯关系最近的国家则不那么认为——俄罗斯的威胁虽然在增长，但已经得到了遏制；普京是一个理性的人，他使用武力时总会进行严肃的成本效益分析；欧洲的和平是有保证的。 |
| The War in Ukraine | 对乌克兰发动战争 |
| The unthinkable can happen. Russia’s war of choice in Ukraine is proof of that. | 不可思议的事情是可能发生的。俄罗斯在乌克兰的非必要战争就是证明。 |
| In the isolation of COVID-19, all of Putin’s obsessions about the 25 million Russians lost to their motherland at the breakup of the Soviet Union seem to have coagulated. | 在新冠疫情的隔离状态下，普京对苏联解体时失去祖国的2500万俄罗斯人的所有执念似乎都固化了。 |
| After President Emmanuel Macron of France met with Putin at opposite ends of a 20-foot table last month, he told journalists that he found Putin more stiff, isolated and ideologically unyielding than at their previous meeting in 2019. | 上个月，法国总统埃马纽埃尔·马克龙与普京会晤，两人之间隔着一张六米长的桌子，后来他告诉记者，和他们在2019年的上一次会晤相比，他发现如今的普京显得更加僵硬、孤立，在意识形态上也更加顽固。 |
| That Ukraine got to Putin in some deeply disturbing way is evident in the 5,000-word tract on “The Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” that he penned in his isolation last summer and had distributed to members of the armed forces. Marshaling arguments ranging back to the ninth century, he said that “Russia was robbed, indeed.” | 乌克兰令普京深感不安，这一点在他去年夏天隔离期间撰写的5000个单词长文《俄罗斯和乌克兰的历史统一》当中显而易见。这本小册子被分发给俄罗斯武装部队成员，书中他整理了可以追溯到九世纪的论点，称“俄罗斯无疑是被打劫了”。 |
| His intent, in hindsight, was clear enough, many months before the invasion. | 事后看来，他的意图在入侵好几个月之前就已经很清楚了。 |
| But why now? The West, Putin had long since concluded, was weak, divided, decadent, given over to private consumption and promiscuity. Germany had a new leader, and France an imminent election. A partnership with China had been cemented. Poor intelligence persuaded him that Russian troops would be greeted as liberators in wide swaths of eastern Ukraine, at least. | 但为什么是现在？普京早就得出结论，西方软弱、分裂、颓废，沉溺于个体消费和滥交。德国有了新的领导人，法国即将举行选举。与中国的伙伴关系得到巩固。糟糕的情报让他相信，至少在乌克兰东部的大片地区，俄罗斯军队会被当作解放者得到欢迎。 |
| In a single stroke, Putin has galvanized NATO, ended Swiss neutrality and German postwar pacifism, united an often fragmented EU, hobbled the Russian economy for years to come, provoked a massive exodus of educated Russians and reinforced the very thing he denied had ever existed, in a way that will prove indelible: Ukrainian nationhood. He has been outmaneuvered by the agile and courageous Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a man he mocked. | 普京这一举动刺激了北约，结束了瑞士的中立和德国的战后和平主义，团结了经常四分五裂的欧盟，使俄罗斯的经济在未来几年内步履维艰，令受过良好教育的俄罗斯人大规模出走。并且，他还以一种无法抹去的方式加强了一种他曾否认其存在的东西：乌克兰的国家意识。他在计谋上输给了机敏勇敢的乌克兰总统泽伦斯基，那个他曾经嘲笑过的人。 |
| It is as if, after a flirtation with a new idea — a Russia integrated with the West — Putin, who will be 70 this year, reverted to something deeper in his psyche: the world of his childhood after The Great Patriotic War had been won, with Russia in his head again liberating Ukrainians from Nazism, and Stalin restored to heroic stature. | 对于“与西方融合的俄罗斯”这个新想法，今年将满70岁的普京对它只有一时的短暂兴致，如今他仿佛又退回到了他心灵更深处的东西：伟大的卫国战争胜利后的童年世界，他脑海中的俄罗斯又要把乌克兰人从纳粹手中解放出来，斯大林又恢复了英雄的地位。 |
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