Paul Craig Roberts (PCR): It was Washington's economic sanctions against Russia, the theft of Russia's central bank reserves, and the theft of Venezuela's gold, not the conflict in Ukraine, that weaponized the US dollar and resulted in global realignment. The limited Russian intervention in Donbas was Putin's belated eight-year-delayed response to the US coup that overthrew the government of Ukraine in 2014 and installed a government hostile to Russia and to the Russian population that had been incorporated into the Ukraine province of the Soviet Union by Soviet leaders. The intervention was forced on Putin by the United States' buildup of a large Ukraine army poised to overthrow the self-declared Donbas republics.