Oh for certain. Putin has been strategizing how to take back all the Soviet countries and territories for decades. He was devastated with the fall of the Soviet Union. <modsnip> Putin would NEVER stray off the course he is on how. He absolutely HATES NATO, and he hates democracies. He is the premier Autocrat in the World. ..Autocrats are his ONLY friends. No one influences the plans of an autocrat, they only enable or distract.
There are "tomes" written about Putin's decades of his strategies... These two articles are good ones. The NYT article is very recent. The Atlantic article was written in the first days of February ..before his attacks, but as often the case with the Atlantic articles, it is an extraordinarily well written about how long Putin has been working on these strategies.
Mr. Putin has long lamented the loss of Ukraine and other republics when the Soviet Union broke apart. Now, diminishing NATO, the military alliance that helped keep the Soviets in check, may be his real mission. Before invading, Russia made a list of far-reaching demands to reshape that structure — positions NATO and the United States rejected.
Mr. Putin has described the Soviet (USSR) disintegration as a catastrophe that robbed Russia of its rightful place among the world’s great powers and put it at the mercy of a predatory West. He has spent his 22 years in power rebuilding Russia’s military and reasserting its geopolitical clout.
The Roots of the Ukraine War: How the Crisis Developed
But the most significant influence on Putin’s worldview has nothing to do with either his KGB training or his desire to rebuild the U.S.S.R. Putin and the people around him have been far more profoundly shaped, rather, by their path to power.
Putin missed that moment of exhilaration. Instead, he was posted to the KGB office in Dresden, East Germany, where he endured the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 as a personal tragedy. For KGB operatives, this was not a time of rejoicing, but rather a lesson about the nature of street movements and the power of rhetoric: democratic rhetoric, antiauthoritarian rhetoric, anti-totalitarian rhetoric. Putin, like his role model Yuri Andropov, who was the Soviet ambassador to Hungary during the 1956 revolution there, concluded from that period that spontaneity is dangerous.
But although Putin missed the euphoria of the ’80s, he certainly took full part in the orgy of greed that gripped Russia in the ’90s. Having weathered the trauma of the Berlin Wall, Putin returned to the Soviet Union and joined his former colleagues in a massive looting of the Soviet state. With the assistance of Russian organized crime as well as the amoral international offshore-money-laundering industry, some of the former Soviet nomenklatura stole assets, took the money out of the country, hid it abroad, and then brought the cash back and used it to buy more assets. Wealth accumulated; a power struggle followed. Some of the original oligarchs landed in prison or exile. Eventually Putin wound up as the top billionaire among all the other billionaires—or at least the one who controls the secret police.
The Reason Putin Would Risk War
️At least 1 million Ukrainians have fled the country since Russia’s invasion began seven days ago, says UN Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi.
