Putin and his St Petersburg mafia were planning on reconstituting their defunct empire before NATO expansion. Don't think that the newly independent Baltic States didn't know this. They knew they had to get into NATO while the window of opportunity was briefly open and before NATO's western European members lost their nerve due to appeasing bedwetters like this writer here. The Soviet Gulag railcar in Tornakalns I pass when I take the train between Riga and Jurmala is a constant reminder of this.
"Russia probably doesn’t want to take over all of Ukraine."--This is complete reality denial, easily debunked by Russia Media Monitor, Justsecurity.org: https://www.justsecurity.org/81789/russias-eliminationist-rhetoric-against-ukraine-a-collection/
Russia fights an exterminationist Ukraine erasure war. Just listen to Pavel Gubarev, who you are utterly deaf to:
"Julia Davis, a journalist and creator of the watchdog group Russian Media Monitor, tweeted the video of Pavel Gubarev as recorded in the Donetsk People's Republic—one of four territories annexed by Russia and recently recognized by the country as its own after voter referendums believed by Ukraine and Western allies to be illegitimate.
"We aren't coming to kill you, but to convince you," Gubarev said. "But if you don't want to be convinced, we'll kill you. We'll kill as many as we have to: 1 million, 5 million, or exterminate all of you." Gubarev, a Ukrainian, is a pro-Russian activist and self-proclaimed "people's governor" of the Donetsk."
At the cost of zero American lives and the equivalent of a rounding error in the Pentagon budget Ukraine provides the US and NATO with an enormous security dividend by keeping Russia off NATO's eastern frontier. The Poles and the Baltics understand this, which is why they donate most and all of their artillery to Ukraine.
Russia and its half millenium history as a commodity exporting genocidal kleptocratic colonial empire built Putin. Each era of Russian history reinvents and dresses up its serf empire in new clothes:
* The Russifying Ukraine erasure nationalism of the post serfdom abolition empire of Alexander III and Nicholas II,
* The Bolsheviks' bait and switch that enserfed what was initially an anarchistic workers' and peasants' revolution (ask the 10000 Kronstadt sailors they massacred).
* Stalin's genocidal Holodomor in Ukraine.
* Putin's mafia with a flag plutocrats' kleptocracy.
Russia's leaders and media have asserted that Russia without empire isn't Russia. The correlation of Russia's imperial ambition with western behavior is a very simple number: zero.
Listen to Stalin biographer Stephen Kotkin:
"Is Russia inherently imperialist and expansionist? Must Russia by some innate cultural
or civilizational trait seek to conquer its neighbors. No Russian aggression is not innate. It is a choice and Russia's rulers could make different choices. Russian aggression stems from what I call Russia's geopolitical conundrum. Russians, especially elites in Russia, have long harbored an abiding sense of living in a providential country. But for half a millennium Russian foreign policy has been characterized by soaring ambitions that have exceeded the country's capabilities.
Russia strives to be a great power of the first rank but finds again and again that Western countries are more powerful. This spurs resentment towards the West for supposedly under-appreciating Russia's uniqueness and importance. It also spurs attempts to manage or even even overcome the gap with the more powerful West. Russia's rulers invariably look to the state as their instrument to manage or close the gap with the West they impose coercive state-led modernization to try to beat Russia into being more competitive while also trying to undermine Western power and unity and as a result this quest for a strong state however invariably devolves into the personal rule of a single individual.
One thinks of the tsarist autocrats from Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great to the Alexanders and the Nicholases and the Communist General secretaries such as Lenin and Stalin down to today's imitator of the czars, Vladimir Putin. Instead of getting a strong state, Russia gets a would-be despot who conflates his personal interests with Russian national interests and conflates the survival of his personal regime with the survival of Russia. And so despite all the differences over time between czarist Russia the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, this pattern has held in a paradox. The efforts to build a strong State have invariably led to subverted institutions and capricious personalistic rule which is only worse than the very geopolitical conundrum falling behind the West it was supposed to fix.
The danger for Russia's neighbors has been evident. Russia has no natural borders except the Pacific Ocean and the Arctic Ocean and to an extent the enormous mountain range in Russia's South stretching from the Caucasus to the Himalayas. Russian security has thus traditionally been partly predicated on moving outward in the name of preempting external attack to seize its neighbors before Western countries could use them as supposed springboards for invasion of Russia. Today too smaller countries on Russia's borders are viewed less as potential friends than as potential beachheads for enemies. In fact this sentiment was only strengthened by the Soviet collapse, as has been made abundantly clear. President Putin and many others among Russia's elites do not recognize the existence of a Ukrainian Nation separate from a Russian one. He views all states on Russia's borders now including
independent Ukraine as weapons in the hands of Western Powers intent on wielding them against Russia. Russia's foreign policy orientation in other words is almost a condition A syndrome but to repeat, it is ultimately a choice. If Russian Elites could somehow relinquish their unwinnable competition with the West and acknowledge that Russia not only cannot but need not be an absolute great power of the first rank, they could set their country on a less costly more promising course. In this connection we can think of Britain and France in the first instance and the Netherlands and Portugal to a lesser extent. Although all those cases involved overseas Empires we can also think of Nazi Germany and Hirohito’s Japan, which were crushed in war.
Until Russia brings its aspirations into line with its actual capabilities it will not become a quote normal country even if it can somehow recover. The rise in its per capita GDP experienced in the early years of Putin's rule whether even a transformed Russia would be accepted into and merge well with Europe is an open question. But the start of the process would need to be a Russian leadership able to get its public to accept permanent retrenchment and agree to embark on an arduous domestic restructuring. You wouldn't be alone in noting that a Russian regime run by Vladimir Putin seems unlikely to ever want to make that case. Someday Russia's leaders may come to terms with the glaring limits of standing up to the west and seeking to dominate Eurasia."
And let's throw in this writer's inability to understand basic math and the difference between budget and GDP. In 1944 the US spent 44% of GDP, not the budget, on the war. Debt/GDP ratio at war's end was 125%. By 1981 it had shrunk to 35%. Why? To paraphrase James Carville, "it's the denominator, stupid." The denominator--GDP--grew fast enough to make the numerator meaningless.
