Fair enough - that much I didn't know. I was looking more generally as to why they tend to have settled in the Western part of Russia rather than the Eastern.
Well, Finland was invaded and taken over by Russia in 1809, so I'm not sure that's all Stalin's doing. I.e. Finland was part of Russia's empire, and remained so until 1917 when they gained full independence rather than remain an (decreasingly) autonomous duchy of the Russian empire.
But they retained close ties with Russia after that, and prefer not to provoke them, hence neutrality and not joining NATO.
It's time for Finland to join NATO and to start pushing for their historical land to be returned in full. If Russians feel St. Petershole is too close to Finland's borders then that slum can be moved elsewhere, not much lost in doing so.
It's not a dissimilar situation to Ukraine: a former part of the Russian empire, now independent. But unlike Finland, Ukraine made quite clear its intention to join the West, overthrowing their leader last decade when he seemed to reject the will of the people and turned back toward Russia.
Indeed, Ukraine took the further step of correctly asserting its natural rights as a nation, knowing that Russia would seek to abuse them regardless; hopefully now Finland will feel motivated to do the same before Russia mistakes a lack of such rights assertions for an invitation to invade them with minimal resistance.
Poland, and other previous parts of the Russian empire, have managed to make that step and join NATO. That, hopefully, makes it too late for Russia to do anything to stop them becoming westernised (if that is their will). But Ukraine hadn't taken that step yet, which means it was Russia's last real chance (Belarus aside) to assert authority over a country it previously had control over.
So I don't see Poland being next, or any other NATO country. Maybe I'm being naive, but I just don't see Putin as that stupid as to engage the US in war, let alone all the other NATO countries.
I think Putin is stupid enough to try just about anything, and so are the people who support him. What he tries next will depend on how much resistance he meets in Ukraine and how willing the globe will be to make stupid compromises with him after he bombs more maternity hospitals.
80 years ago Russia had all the Eastern bloc countries - including half of Germany - between Russia and the West. Now the West (i.e. the EU, NATO) is literally on its border. That's a huge buffer that crumbled with the fall of the iron curtain and the USSR.
Russia never had a right to any such buffer in the first place. Indeed we should be looking at the territorial and financial compensation Russia owes to western Europeans for centuries of occupying their lands and replacing the indigenous populations with loyalist inbred peasants. Asian populations victimized by Russian land theft are entitled to compensation and rectification as well.
Kazakhstan isn't really a democracy, but rather an authoritarian regime. It's also part of the CSTO (Russia's equivalent of NATO). They even asked for CSTO "peacekeepers" to help intervene against the what Belarus' Lukashenko termed "international terrorists" (or just demonstrators, as they may well have been). The CSTO force was in and out within a week, but the riots were mostly fuel-price related (sudden hikes) and seemed to mostly end when the government reinstated the price-cap.
If the regime in Kazakhstan had enough popular support to rightfully rule over the population there, it wouldn't have needed its puppet masters in Moscow to send troops in to suppress this same population. I believe the events there may have played a significant role in deciding Putin's agenda; he thinks invading Ukraine will stop the rest of the world from not wanting to be ruled by lazy dumb people who have only ever accomplished things on a national level through the theft and rape of smaller, more intelligent populations and their lands.
Yeah, I think the latter would be the only scenario. Putin has said (words to the effect of) "what point of a world without Russia in it"... so before the end of Russia I'm sure he would rather end the world.
Good so then he and his supporters should be nuked first as soon as there's any sign of an imminent launch of any scale, unless his own people want to avoid that scenario and stop him before it's too late. The US and the rest of the world would have been far better off completing WW2 by driving Stalin off the planet, now we might have to pay a much heavier price to correct that mistake.
Fortunately he's never put Russia up against a nuclear power. And he's running out of space in Europe to do so, as NATO is a nuclear power (assuming US, UK, France etc, live up to what NATO stands for).
Ukraine should get its nukes back or new ones to replace them, since Russia forfeited its own part of the agreement that got rid of them.
I think you're underestimating the level of control that the Russian state has over what people in the country think. But there's also likely a divide: the older generation who still stick to the notion of mother-Russia where they blindly follow Moscow, still fearful of what it means to not follow; and then the younger generation, more used to world-wide information flows, more open to what the West has to offer. They're the ones protesting in Russia, they're the ones who the current regime are going to struggle with in the future.
But there's not a huge amount they can do in a country where elections are clearly rigged, to the point where being an opposition candidate is likely a death-sentence.
I understand your argument and I feel sympathy for the minority of Russians who genuinely recognize and regret the centuries of naked criminality involved in establishing their nation. Having spent most of my life speaking and communicating with plenty of Russians both in Russia itself and those living freely here in the democratic west, I am thoroughly convinced that the majority of them have chosen to willfully buy into and support Putin's propaganda as a means of compensating for their personal insecurities and national shortcomings, and they are therefore deserving of the worst consequences possible.
