Except he isn't actually. Explicit that is. He very much prefers to keep his messaging implicit in this regard to speak through actions when the moment presen

Except he isn't actually. Explicit that is. He very much prefers to keep his messaging implicit in this regard to speak through actions when the moment presents itself, and let others connect the dots. That's why he's never explicitly said he wants to recover former territories wholesale. Instead he says things like his signature line about the collapse of the USSR being the "greatest political catastrophe of the [20th] century", what a tragedy it was that "tens of millions of our co-citizens and co-patriots found themselves outside Russian territory" via this "epidemic of disintegration". And then (in a different speech), how as a result of this "We turned into a completely different country. And what had been built up over 1,000 years was largely lost", and so on. Which presents the implication that, well, to make everything good again, one of the things Russia can do is get all these territories, and not just ethnic Russians, but all these "co-citizens and co-patriots" back into the Motherland. To, you know, get back what they had built up over 1,000 years, and make the Motherland great again. And when he approves actions to start menacing the borders of the Baltic states, and has proxies such as Medvedev issue statements reminding Poland that its borders were "a gift of Stalin", that's just his way of jerking everyone's cortisol levels, and underscoring the core message of his speeches. Apart from what he actually says -- I don't think he even secretly has a specific plan to start retaking any of these countries (aside from of course Ukraine, about which he is thoroughly obsessed and which is of course a special case). He's just making it up as he goes along. His main goal (aside from Ukraine) seems to be to signal to the West that he doesn't care about its ethics or norms, and certainly not its stupid fixation with borders and rule of law. He's just going to do whatever the fuck he wants and thinks is in Russia's interest, and which he thinks he can get away with. And if it comes to either invading and/or simply fucking up countries whose governments take actions he just doesn't like, or which just think ways he doesn't like, he may very well do that (as he did with Georgia). But it's not like he has a specific plan of reconquest, necessary. And even if he were to decide to go that route, it's not like he's going to come out and announce his intention (just as he never did so in regard to Ukraine). That's just not his style.