Ukraine - Main Article

Russia's Struggle Against Decline: A Deep Dive into Imperial Legacy and Future Prospects — UNITED24 Media
Vladimir Solovyov Is Driving Russia Toward Strategic Isolation - Caspianpost.com
Russia’s Nostalgia Machine by Nina L. Khrushcheva - Project Syndicate
Rebel comrades: How Russian imperial nostalgia found its Confederate soul - Salon.com
How Soviet nostalgia and silence enable wartime complicity on Russian YouTube
What Happens to Russia’s Ethnic Minorities After the War? - League of Ukrainian Canadians
Imperial nostalgia or prudent geopolitics? Russia's efforts to reintegrate the post-Soviet space in geopolitical perspective: Post-Soviet Affairs: Vol 30, No 6

One online Ukraine site  ( www.kyivindependent.com/ ) offers a newsletter "WTF is wrong with Russia? ", which promotes Russian motivation as much more than the nasty whims of one bad guy. There is a large back story we can all access with some good reading to start:

Putin’s Dark Ages: Political Neomedievalism and Re-Stalinization in Russia, By Dina Khapaeva 

Ukraine in Flames: What is wrong with 'the Russian soul'? | UACRISIS.ORG

From the Ukraine Crisis Media Center (UCMC, uacrisis.org) : "... Russians have humiliated Ukrainians and violated their right to self-determination for centuries. In Russian literature, Ukrainians are usually written about as “Little Russians”, and the Ukrainian language as a dialect, which is derogatory and contemptuous. Russian popular art is often full of xenophobia towards non-Russians and the grandeur of the Russian nation. The Russian media and education are laced with derogatory catchwords about Ukrainian politics, ex. “Bandera” or “little brothers”. So what’s wrong with the Russian soul and how has Russian culture become an integral part of the hybrid war against Ukraine?"

A main ideological supporter of Putin, Russian "MAGA" philosopher, Aleksandr Dugin, somewhere said: “Ukraine has to be either vanished from Earth and rebuilt from scratch or people need to get it. I think people in Ukraine need total revolt on all levels and in all regions", “I think kill, kill and kill. No more talk anymore. It is my opinion as a professor,” and also: “through the Russian people will be realized the last thought of God, the thought of the End of the World”.

Charmer. Boy O Boy! That's Big Boy Talk!

The Imperialist Philosopher Who Demanded the Ukraine War | The New Yorker
Aleksandr Dugin - Wikipedia 

From Karl Marx Revelations on Russia; Dialogue with Bakunin

"Muscovy, it's an Empire forged in slavery . To sum up, it is in the terrible and abject school of Mongolian slavery that Muscovy was nursed and grew up. It gathered strength only by becoming a virtuoso in the craft of serfdom. Even when emancipated, Muscovy continued to perform its traditional part of the slave, as well as the master. At length, Peter the Great coupled the political craft of the Mongol slave with the proud aspiration of the Mongol master to whom Genghis Khan had, by will, bequeathed his conquest of the earth. "

In the 1917 Russian revolution, Lenin's policies combined ideological justification with pragmatic ruthlessness, using terror as both a policy choice and a substitute for legitimate authority. Propaganda & terror were acceptable tools for dealing with 'the masses'. Terror evolved thru Czars, the Soviets, Stalin, purges, gulags, the KGB, arriving with exquisit expertise in hands of Putin and exotic poisonings, disappearances, unlikely strange falls from apartments, clumsy eensorship, blustering diplomatically.

While Russia holds no excliusive monopoly, it looks like it has a deep habit and legacy of cruelty and deception, maybe going back to Ivan the Terrible, Tamarline, the Mongols.It embodies streaks of cruelty and brooding darkness way deeper and more excessive than other cultures.

In the the words of Azamat Uldarov, an ex-fighter of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group who personally admitted to shooting dead a five or six-year-old girl, speaking to Russian independent outlet Gulagu.net: “We went and killed everyone. There were women, men, seniors, and children.” Uldarov, together with ex-Wagner commander Aleksei Savichev, both described being given and carrying out orders to “clean” entire buildings or areas in Donetsk Oblast of civilians by murdering them all .

We killed Ukrainian children, ex-Wagner soldiers say in apparent confession – POLITICO.

https://www.quora.com/Many-people-use-to-blame-Russian-authoritarianism-on-the-Mongols-but-to-what-degree-is-this-correct-Because-according-to-what-I-have-read-about-the-Mongols-did-they-generally-practice-elective-monarchy-with-rather

"The atrocities in Ukraine aren't aberrations — they're rooted in centuries of uniquely brutal warfare."

Check out  Tim Snyder,, who recently, owing to Trumpsterism, moved from USA to UoT.

His books include Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010),

“It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander. It is tempting to say that a Nazi murderer is beyond the pale of understanding. ...Yet to deny a human being his human character is to render ethics impossible.To yield to this temptation, to find other people inhuman, is to take a step toward, not away from, the Nazi position. To find other people incomprehensible is to abandon the search for understanding, and thus to abandon history.”

“When meaning is drawn from killing, the risk is that more killing would bring more meaning.”

Tim's other related books:

• On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017),
• The Road to Unfreedom (2018), and
• Our Malady (2020).

“Calling others fascists while being a fascist is the essential Putinist practice. Jason Stanley, an American philosopher, calls it “undermining propaganda.” I have called it “schizofascism.” The Ukrainians have the most elegant formulation. They call it “ruscism.”

 Ukrainians cannot forget Holodomor(murder by starvation)(holodomor.ca );   Stalin's forced collecivization and food theft, millions starved.

 
Many countries, including Canada, recognize Holodomor as genocide.

“Putin follows in the tracks imitates of Stalin’s policies, who organized the Holodomor in Ukraine” Timothy Snyder

Holodomor - Wikipedia

www.holodomor.ca/resource/holodomor-basic-facts/

Look up Mikhail Zygar, former ACE Russian journalist; some quotes from his "War and Punishment":

"On February 24, the first day of the war, around 140 million people woke up without the future they'd had the night before. All plans, all dreams, were destroyed that morning. And not at the whim of one man. They were devoured by the empire. "

"Not everyone realizes this yet. Many are still drugged up, intoxicated by the grandeur of imperialism. "

"Looking back, we see a horrific sight: our ancestors, indoctrinated to believe they were victors, were themselves victims. They were forced to kill, to rejoice in the killing, to take pride in the killing. And they were good at it. They were proud; they got high; they wrote beautiful poems, songs, and books glorifying blood and violence, the crunching of bones. And they forgot it was their own blood, their own bones."

"Sure, not only Russia is intoxicated by this drug. It affects all empires. But they have to sort themselves out. We cannot cure them; we must cure ourselves. We are the ones guilty in front of the Ukrainians, Poles, Finns, Georgians, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, Tatars, Kalmyks, Tungus, Yakuts, Buryats, the list goes on."

"But now the empire is forever consigned to the past. Some might argue it's still too early to say. Oh no it isn't. Future generations of Russians will remember with horror and shame the war that Putin unleashed. They will marvel at how archaic hubris came to dominate the minds of twenty-first-century people. And they will not tread the same path if we, their ancestors, bear the punishment today."

... and more on today

 Chrystia said: “Pussyfooting around Putin doesn't really work," and the late Dr. Henry Kissinger said in 2016, “To understand Putin, one must read Dostoevsky, not Mein Kampf.”

former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, recently on Facebook & FOX news:

“Putin won’t stop unless he’s made to”,
“Putin can’t be stopped with words. He’ll only stop when he realizes he can’t go any further.” ,
“He seems to be more out of control than he used to be,”
“He was always an imperialist, but there is something about him now that seems almost more desperate in wanting to extinguish Ukraine.”