Adolph Hitler was very outspoken about his beliefs and his plans. The superior race needed space. Their destiny was to colonize lands occupied by various inferior peoples.
Russia has no such ambitions. As Mq said many, many times over the years, at the present rate it would take Putin 1000 years to restore the former USSR. Besides, real wealth and power are no longer in land and plunder - it’s in having a highly developed technology, science… high productivity, competitiveness.
Look at China - the above worked miracles for the Chinese people over the past 30 years. Why on earth would they want to bring back the nightmares of mass starvations and killings, the insanity of “cultural revolutions” and other such glories? Why would they want to enslave other nations? They’re worth more as customers.
Same, in essence, is true for Russia. They know very well that shootouts with resistance fighters in forests and swamps is NOT the side on which the bread is buttered. I see no signs of them having expansionist imperial ambitions. They’re defensive - in a sense of protecting what’s they have. Crimea? After Maidan, one of the first actions of the new regime was to outlaw Russian as an official language. And that’s in a country where a great part of the population - probably the majority - were natural Russian speakers. There were concerns that Maidan could quickly expand - to kick out Russia from Crimea. They could have done it in a matter of days, with NATO’s help. So, Russia did it first. They had far more historical claims on Crimea, which was never under Ukraine, but directly under the Russian Crown.
With 95% of Crimean population being natural Russian speakers - and with the promise that their pensions and other compensations would be brought in line with those of Russia - a few times higher - the Referendum was a breeze.
I’m not touching the current war in this context, for now. Had NATO made any reasonable effort to address Russia’s concerns- it would not have happened, imho. |
