Putin's two greatest foreign policy victories, stopping international intervention in Syria and annexing Crimea, depended on the West's timidity. In both scenarios, Putin employed a two-fold strategy. First the Kremlin disarmed and delayed the high-level international response. Then it used propaganda to play on the West's inertia and erode public support for international action. However, it remains to be seen whether or not that policy will be successful in eastern Ukraine.

The Kremlin's recipe for success is to delay, orchestrate and then break its agreements.

At various points in the Syria crisis it looked as if the world was prepared to intervene to stop the bloodshed. In the fall of 2011, as the crisis escalated and Syrian President Bashar Assad's own army defected, Russia vetoed the first United Nations Security Council resolution on Syria. A month later, Russia heralded a diplomatic breakthrough, as Assad inked an agreement with the Arab League to withdraw his troops. But as Assad told the world he was withdrawing, videos posted online clearly showed his tanks rolling into Syria's cities.

It took the Arab League months to revitalize its mission only to conclude that at no point in time did Assad ever comply with his agreements. By the time the UN started to search for an alternative solution, much of Syria was embroiled in civil war. Russia then ardently defended a weak plan that it helped broker. Launched too late and with no enforcement mechanism, the plan was clearly doomed to fail.

This is first part of the Kremlin's recipe for getting ahead in the world: delay, orchestrate and then immediately break international agreements. By the time the international community and the far-too-polite media reach the conclusion that you lied, you and your allies will be so far ahead of the game that it will not matter.

The second part of Putin's strategy is even more insidious, though, because it involves Western apathy skillfully exploited by Russian propaganda. Enter Russia's propaganda outlet RT, or Russia Today. Its guests and hosts range from the far right wing to the far left, from Julian Assange to Larry King. RT is able to obfuscate the facts just enough and rally enough voters on all sides of the political spectrum to help change the electoral math on foreign policy.

Russia's positioning of Assad as Syria's legitimate leader, despite the massive peaceful protests that launched the Syrian revolution, was also a propaganda coup. And while Russia praised Assad for fighting those it labeled terrorists, planes maintained by Russian specialists bombed Syria's cities into oblivion. Russia and Assad compounded the lie by claiming that these "terrorists" were really foreign agents working to topple the legitimate government.