When Russia annexed the Crimea Peninsula in March, a flag picturing Vladimir Putin flew in Moscow. Zuma Press As Western governments seethed last spring over Russia’s takeover of the Crimea region in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin told advisers that the world eventually would accept the audacious move. The Kremlin was confident the economic costs of Western sanctions, though substantial, would be tolerable for the world’s ninth-largest economy. For much of the year, the Russian president’s gamble seemed to pay off. “His forecasts have come true,” Alexei Kudrin, a former finance minister and longtime Putin adviser, said in May. “A lot of people have come to terms with Crimea now, at least informally.” Mr. Putin also seemed confident, according to people who spoke to him at the time, that the deep ties he had nurtured for years with major trade partners like Germany would limit the fallout. Those calculations turned […]