Where does Mother Russia go from here? Bitter at their losses in the Cold War and post-Cold War years, many Russian nationalists are urging the regime to align with today’s great power antagonist of the United States, Xi Jinping’s China.
“The demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” said Russia’s new ruler Vladimir Putin in his 2005 state of the nation address.
“As for the Russian people,” Putin went on, “it became a genuine tragedy. Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory.”
From Putin’s standpoint, the statement was then and remains today understandable.
Consider. When Putin entered his country’s secret service, Berlin was 110 miles deep inside a Soviet-occupied East Germany. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria were member states of the Warsaw Pact.
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