Russia’s President Vladimir Putin (R) reviews a map during a meeting with Alexei Miller, the CEO of Russian gas monopoly Gazprom, at Putin’s residence outside Moscow on Oct. 29, 2012.Alexei Nikolsky / AFP / Getty Images We will look back at 2014 as the year Russian President Vladimir Putin pushed all his chips into the center of the table — risking everything to make Russia a world power again. Even his apologists now acknowledge that Putin wants to resurrect the Russian empire with most of the Soviet Union’s lost territories either incorporated into Russia, as with Crimea, or in its orbit, similar to eastern Ukraine and Belarus, as well as the Caucasian and Central Asian states. The range of Putin’s geostrategic tools is also on display: the Eurasian Union, military brawn and proxy militias in the near abroad, and Russia’s petroleum exports as the main source of income and […]