The Russian Mind. II.ii.

"Germans’ ambivalence toward the United States is understandable. President George W. Bush ran roughshod over America’s closest allies in the lead-up to the Iraq War, and Barack Obama perpetuated the insult with his strategic “pivot” to East Asia. Obama, who happily used Berlin as the backdrop for a 2008 campaign speech, miffed Chancellor Angela Merkel when he skipped the party for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall."
...

"It has taken Russian President Vladimir Putin to refocus minds on both sides of the Atlantic. With his annexation of Crimea and intervention in eastern Ukraine, Putin bared to the world the scars from psychological wounds he sustained in 1989. The fall of the Berlin Wall didn’t just mean the reunification of a city, country, and continent – but the Kremlin’s loss of control over half of Europe."

"Putin, who was working as a KGB agent in East Germany at the time, witnessed how people power brought down the system it was his duty to preserve. He personally warded off a crowd of East German activists from storming the KGB building in Dresden. When the bedraggled remains of the Red Army left East Germany after German unification in 1990, the retreating soldiers of the broken Soviet empire inspired pity, not fear."

...

"The struggle for freedom that began in 1989 is not history – and it’s not over. Kiev’s Maidan protest last winter was a belated episode of the Velvet Revolution that swept eastern Europe 25 years ago: citizens standing up for their rights, including the one to rejoin the European family. Putin punished Ukrainians by dismembering their country not only because he saw in their protest a threat to his own power. It was late revenge for the world he lost in 1989."

"Dmitry Medvedev, then Russia’s president, attended the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall five years ago. Nobody is expecting Putin this year."
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2014/11/07/25-years-after-it-fell-vladimir-putin-puts-berlin-walls-lessons-front-and-center/