CHICAGO — Russian President Vladimir Putin committed a major “strategic error” in believing his invasion of Ukraine would fragment Western democracies, the British foreign minister for Europe and North America said in Chicago this week.
Instead, Foreign Office Minister James Cleverly said, Putin saw the NATO alliance and allied countries unite against Russian aggression in a sign of democracy’s resilience.
“Democracy is messy. Democracy is untidy, and to an autocratic leader like Putin, it probably always looks as if it’s on the verge of collapse,” Cleverly, the British equivalent of U.S. secretary of state, said in an interview in Chicago with the Tribune on Wednesday.
