Old Russian

Anyone who believes Putin would hold the line at Donbas, leave Kyiv’s government in place, or refrain from threatening other former Soviet republics hasn’t been paying attention to what Putin himself has been saying about his goals the past year—e.g., that Ukraine is a fiction, its people don’t exist as a separate culture, and that Russia has a legitimate interest in not only carving out a sphere of influence but re-creating the old Russian empire in the space of what was once the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact.

There is an old Russian saying that "nothing is agreed until everything is agreed".

It’s unclear how much this weighs against his dream of restoring the old Russian empire, the first step of which is to regain control of all of Ukraine.

On a visit to the school and to mothers of the victims in North Ossetia, he said "just as we fought with terrorists previously, now we fight with those who commit crimes in Kursk region, Donbas and Novorossiya", using an old Russian imperial term for areas of occupied Ukraine.

When Biden was asked if he trusted Xi, he invoked an old Russian adage popularized by President Reagan during the Cold War: “Trust but verify.”