There are a few points of importance to be made. First of all, we need to confirm the contents of the CNN report. Journalists aren't exactly known for their diligence, accuracy, and integrity. Secondly, we need to recognize that weakness always begets greater aggression. We in the West have signaled abject weakness to Putin over and over and over again. Now, it's worse: the neofascists of the US Republican Party and the mindless sniveling moron Trump have made it explicit that they want to hand Ukraine (and any other European nation) to Putin in thanks for the money and Internet subversion he's been providing them over the last several years. So we can expect NATO do to what it does best if Putin does indeed realize he can act with total impunity: nothing whatsoever.

Thirdly, we have to realize there will be no war between Russia and NATO. NATO has zero capacity to fight and so more appeasement is the only option. I wrote an article on what the future is going to look like just a day or two ago; you may want to archive it and look at it again in three years time to assess how much of it came true.

The important thing in life is to ignore the surface babble generated by empty-heads and instead consider the fundamentals. When we do that, we see that despite all its shortcomings in every aspect of life, Russia will indeed dominate Europe in the years ahead, China will take Taiwan almost effortlessly, and the USA will become a de facto dictatorship while (like Rome long ago and Russia today) keeping enough democratic window-dressing to enable ordinary people to pretend nothing much has changed.