Russia.

And China from the east. Hadn't thought about that. The excerpts below are from an article by Francis Matthew in gulfnews.com. Putin, with reason, feels surrounded. The post-Soviet expansion of the EU and NATO from the West and China's economic rise from the east: Those could make a guy's collar tight. We understand that now. We can see the basis for Putin's angst and anger.

It is Putin...It is Putin who doesn't understand: The Soviet empire imploded, it was not exploded; that is, the Soviet Union was a failure. The Soviet Union was a failure economically, socially, by every measure of human well-being and it was a failure comparatively. Compared to Europe and America, even China. As soon as people within the old Soviet Union could leave, they did leave. They left, they were not invaded and taken away against their will from Mother Russia. They left because the Soviet Union's ideas failed. And because of that the idea of the Soviet Union failed.

Vladimir Putin sees Russia being surrounded, its predecessor's territorial reach continually constricted. He sees a phantom. If you follow Putin's thinking, then Russia is going to be invaded and conquered by an American-led West. That is the logical next step to being surrounded. I don't know that Putin has followed his thinking out that next step because I don't think he believes that, that Lithuanians and Poles and Czechs and Britons, French, Albanians, Cypriots, Americans, Spaniards, want to invade, occupy, hold, and conquer Russia, demolish Red Square, fly the flag of Lithuania, et al atop the Kremlin, with perhaps a simultaneous pincer movement from the Chinese in the East? What Putin doesn't understand, or it is, understandably, too painful for him to think, is that nobody wants Russia. Nobody wants Russia, least of all its ideas. The idea of a Greater Russia appeals to no one except Russians.

There is a stanza in the lyrics of the old Soviet national anthem, "Unbreakable union of freeborn republics great Russia has welded forever to stand." Welded: The one measure of greatness of the Soviet Union was in welding, using the hard, cold steel of its military to force other peoples into a "union" with great Russia. That is all there was to the greatness of the Soviet Union, that is all that is left to Vladimir Putin. He is welding Ukraine back with Russia. He will succeed. But Ukraine will not die. It survived being a Soviet satellite, it will survive as a satellite of Greater Russia. Greater Russia will not survive. It will become over-extended and implode just as the Soviet Union did. Nobody wants Russia, nobody wants to be "like" Russia, to emulate her. Least of all do people want more of Russia.

Europe and Washington need to recognise that in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, both the EU (social and economic) and Nato (military) quickly expanded east, in a blatant threat to Moscow which at the same time also saw its position in Central Asia collapsing. Xie Tao of Beijing Foreign Studies University, writing in the current issue of the influential Korean journal Global Asia, comments on how China has made serious inroads into the Central Asian republics that were Russia’s private territory in the days of the USSR. Chinese trade with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan has grown 100 times from $467 million (Dh1.17 billion) in 1992 to $45.9 billion in 2012 as insatiable Chinese demand for oil and gas has driven them to build a new network of pipelines and supply lines.
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All this Chinese activity in Central Asia is profoundly worrying to Moscow as it seeks to preserve 
what little direct influence it can having lost all of Central Europe. Vladimir Putin sees Russia as losing on all fronts to outside forces, destroying its historic legacy.

Nato’s blunder

George Keenan was the US diplomat who wrote the famous ‘long telegram’ in 1946 and the subsequent ‘X’ Article that set out the strategic vision that defined US policy towards the USSR during the Cold War. He was the architect of the policy that described how the two former allies could not remain friends, yet did not have to go to war. Keenan was vehemently against president Bill Clinton’s invitation in 1997 to expand Nato to include Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. He described Clinton’s support for this proposal as a “strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions”. And a few days later, he expanded his thoughts in the New York Times, describing the expansion of Nato as “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era”.

When Clinton read these views, he checked with his deputy secretary of state, Strobe Talbott, who replied that the Russians would go along with the expansion, regardless of what Keenan might predict. Subsequent events have proved how wrong Talbott was, but only after Nato’s startlingly rapid expansion.

Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined Nato in 1999, followed by seven countries from Central Europe and the Baltic in 2004, and then Albania and Croatia in 2009. President George Bush senior was actively courting membership for Ukraine and Georgia at the same time, although they backed off under Russian pressure and Russia supported the secession of Abkhazia and South Ossetia to punish the Georgians for their temerity in looking West. And today, Ukraine is being made to pay the penalty. It has already lost Crimea and the government’s authority in eastern Ukraine is being challenged. President Oleksandr Turchynov can say what he likes, but there has been no concerted government action to take back its authority. In fact, the region’s police appear to have 
defected en masse to the pro-Russian side and Russian flags and those of the self-proclaimed Donetsk Republic are flying on the barricades and public buildings. Russian annexation is creeping closer and closer.

Image: Bust of Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union, in Pripyat, Ukraine, part of the Soviet Union, home to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.