@Sulkhan I respectfully disagree.
Russian autocracy and imperialism is nothing new, and #Putin is simply the latest manifestation.
The Russians ARE culturally different to the Ukrainians, and the Europeans, and the Americans etc.
That's why they willingly submit.
Glory to #Ukraine
Russia is not fighting for survival. It is fighting for appetite.
The numbers first. 17.1 million km² — 11% of the planet’s land surface, eleven time zones, nearly twice the size of the next largest country. No state on Earth has less material reason to expand. None expands more relentlessly.
Control case: Canada. Second-largest country in the world. Resource-rich, sparsely populated, sharing a border with a superpower. Wars of conquest launched: zero. Territory does not generate aggression. Doctrine does.
So take the Kremlin’s “security” claim and run it to its logical end. What security does a country holding an eleventh of the Earth still lack? Only one: the existence of neighbors. A state that size claiming existential threat is not describing a danger. It is describing a demand — that no one else be sovereign within its reach.
Empires do not expand because they lack land. They expand because they lack limits.
Russia’s problem was never that it is too small. It is that nothing will ever be enough. That is not geography. That is pathology.