Putin's ambitions not limited to Ukraine

 Joel Gehrke:

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s justification for seizing additional territory from Ukraine signals his long-term desire to subjugate other Central and Eastern European countries, including current members of NATO, according to U.S. and European officials.

“The reasoning that Putin has presented, when he published his demands to NATO and to the United States earlier this year, this reasoning is signaling that his ambition goes way beyond Ukraine,” Germany’s Reinhard Bütikofer, a senior member of the European Parliament, told the Washington Examiner. “His ambition includes the zeal to establish security dominance of Russia over all of the countries that used to belong to the Soviet bloc.”

Russian military forces have entered Ukraine with the announced goal of partitioning the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine after years of fighting between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian separatists reinforced by Russian troops. That operation is far more limited than any hypothetical assault against a NATO ally, as Bütikofer hastened to acknowledge.

However, Putin couched the announcement in a lengthy historical argument that portrayed the formation of states that used to be part of the Russian empire before the rise and fall of the Soviet Union as an offense against “the historical destiny of Russia and its peoples” that flowed from Bolshevik revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin’s putative acquiescence to “nationalists within the country” after the First World War.

“Why was it necessary to appease the nationalists, to satisfy the ceaselessly growing nationalist ambitions on the outskirts of the former empire?” Putin said, according to the official Kremlin translation of his address. “When it comes to the historical destiny of Russia and its peoples, Lenin’s principles of state development were not just a mistake; they were worse than a mistake, as the saying goes. This became patently clear after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.”

Putin argued Soviet leaders erred after the Bolshevik revolution by agreeing even to pay lip-service to the idea that the various states of the Soviet Union might ever be able to leave the bloc — a decision amounting to the “outright pillage of Russia,” as he described the break-up of the Soviet Union.

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There is more.

Russia's problem is not the lack of land, it is the lack of intelligent leadership and a population that is not particularly ambitious when it comes to the production of goods and services that people want.  For example, Japan is a much smaller landmass, but its people are much more industrious than Russians.  The US landmass is also smaller than Russia, but its economy is much more robust.

See, also:

'Flagrant violation': Biden blasts Putin, promises tough action over Ukraine

Biden acts like he should call a lawyer, as if Putin cares.