Russia is the Nokia of empire with a doomed legacy business model. America's alliance networks make it the asset lite iPhone of informal empire.
I can't predict what Russia's borders will be 10-20 years from now. They may not be Muscovy's of 1500, but they won't be the current ones.
History holds infinite surprises. If you had told my Ukrainian-born grandparents (Vinnitsya, Rivne, Chmelnik) that an independent NATO-allied Ukraine that had elected a Jewish comedian president was winning a war with Russia, they would have called you completely meshugah.
Of course, if you'd told the Lester of 1977 that the American left was supporting the CIA and the FBI to stop a riot-supported coup at the Capitol by a far-right Republican Russian asset in the White House, I would have asked "what are you smoking and can I have some?"
Real history runs on Douglas Adams' improbability drive gives us what no novelist could ever invent.
