ScottCDunn:"Do you believe that since the end of WWII, Russia has been acting in a vacuum, with no other forces exerting against it?

If yes, you're ignoring huge swaths of history."

You seem to be completely unwilling to deal with a larger swath of history, which is that for centuries Russia has been working to colonize its periphery and that the current Ukraine conflict is just a continuation of these colonization efforts. Colonization is wrong and evil.