Because I think Russia’s project has far more to do with their internal politics than with geopolitics. The Chechen wars foreshadowed Ukraine, and were enitrely

Because I think Russia’s project has far more to do with their internal politics than with geopolitics. The Chechen wars foreshadowed Ukraine, and were enitrely, as with Ukraine, a response to the fall of the Soviet empire. (Perhaps a Marshall Plan-esque foreign policy could have forestalled their revanchism. Perhaps - chauvinism is hard to break. But abandoning the eastern former subject states would not alone have been enough.)