Putin's war isn't a useful term though, because there are so many of them. Regarding change from "that Russia" to the modern one, I'm afraid there has been cha

Putin's war isn't a useful term though, because there are so many of them. Regarding change from "that Russia" to the modern one, I'm afraid there has been change, to the worse. The Soviet incarnation of the empire was at least nominally bound to the progressive ideas of socialism (which is completely orthogonal to wether those ideas are workable or not), whereas the current incarnation is openly worshipping the fascist ideas of strength and domination, and the struggle to get there. When Russians claim that they don't understand why someone would willingly ally with others who don't prove worthy by actively coercing them, chances are it's genuine, they really don't understand. Sometimes I wonder if their language even has a word for friendship based on equality that is separate from an asymmetric allegiance based on status gradient. Perhaps all the non-gradient terminology was gobbled up by socialist ideology and now the very idea of peers is out, except where seeing it through the socialist lense still fits?