On the other hand, the West pushed too far. The Crimean Peninsula is a historically Russian enclave; indeed, a place that even the best-known Soviet dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, argued shouldn’t have been cleaved from Russia when Khrushchev did so in 1954. Ukraine is the Slavic breadbasket. It is the home of Kievan Rus for god sakes! No Russian leader could ever survive another day in office if he did not act as if Ukraine was the reddest of redlines.