THE TROUBLE WITH RUSSIA

THE COUP WAS PLANNED FOR election day. Wearing fake police uniforms and armed with assault rifles, more than a dozen Kremlin-linked plotters were allegedly preparing to storm the parliament of the tiny Balkan nation of Montenegro and assassinate its Prime Minister. Their goal, according to the government’s investigators, was to stop the country of 620,000 from joining NATO, which would give the U.S.-led alliance control of nearly every northern Mediterranean port from Gibraltar to the Bosporus. On a tip from an informant, real Montenegrin police rounded up the plotters as polls opened for the vote in October. Two ringleaders, both suspected agents of the Russian intelligence services, are now back in Russia.

The aborted coup was a reminder that a new battle for Europe has begun. From the Baltics to the Balkans and the Black Sea to Great Britain, Vladimir Putin is seeking to rebuild Russia’s empire more than 25 years after the fall of the Soviet Union. From Jan. 29 to Feb. 3, Russian-backed forces launched thousands of strikes in renewed attacks on pro-European government positions deep inside Ukraine. Using propaganda, agents provocateurs and overt military threats in Estonia, Serbia, Moldova and other East European countries, Putin is attempting to undermine the democratic governments of former communist countries, threatening the security of millions of people. Farther west, he is pursuing alliances with nationalist, anti-E.U. forces in France, Germany, Hungary and other major democracies.

Perhaps the most important front in this new conflict has been unfolding in the West Wing. Over the course of the past three months, according to senior Trump Administration officials and others who have participated, quiet but consequential talks have taken place there over whether the U.S. should resist Putin in his new campaign or cede to Russia a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. In return for the latter, the theory goes, Russia would