Putin essentially engineered a bailout of the Ukrainian state using Eurobonds, which is not a way governments typically lend to other governments, and the effect of lending in this way and specifically changing and adding some sentences to the legal contracts that underpin the Eurobond was to ensure that any escalation of the crisis in Ukraine occurred —either a break between the Yanukovych government and Putin or a successful revolution— that not only would Ukraine be plunged into an economic crisis, but that this crisis would be elevated to a crisis over some of the fundamental roles and in particular the primary position of the United States in the international economic order.
