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You have to understand that in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, Russians adored America. Some of it was definitely due to forbidden fruit seeming sweeter but even as that wore off Russia looked to the US to help it in the 1990s.

First of all, Russia is not paranoid when it worries about NATO expansion. NATO was created to contain and confront the Soviet Union and has been slowly creeping eastwards.

Russians remember the last time a hostile power started expanding to the east. The average Russian today lost a grandfatherd in World War II, and a few uncles, maybe even some aunts or a grandmother. After all, approximately 26 million Soviet citizens were killed in the war, most of them civilians. There was hardly a nuclear family that didn’t have a family member killed. That’s over 4 Holocausts in terms of people dead.

All those people died in part because Russia has vulnerable and weak borders to the West. It was only invaded from the East once, by the Mongols, and that was traumatic enough since Mongol and Tatar control lasted for hundreds of years. But after that came the invasions from the West. Russia has been invaded from the West at least once every century for the past FOUR CENTURIES, and each time it caused massive human suffering and death, not to mention horrendous economic losses that saw Russia constantly trying to “catch up” to the West economically. Russia has been invaded by the Poles, the Lithuanians, the Swedes, the French under Napoleon in 1812 (when Moscow mostly burned to the ground), and the Germans twice in two world wars.

Russia learned, the hard way, a few key concepts about defense. First, the only real natural defensive barriers it had were the Pripet marshes in the north, the Dnepr river in the south and the Crimean peninsula in the far south. Control of all three of those natural barriers makes breaking into Russia expensive in human life for any invader. Second, having extended borders with enemies is dangerous and increases, rather than decreases, the chance of war between Russia and its putative enemies. Third, having buffer states to the West with friendly governments is one of the best ways (from Russia’s perspective at least) that Russia can additionally secure the Western borders.

Soviets grew up with Victory Day, May 9, when the Soviet Union honored the living and the dead who stopped the Nazis. The song they heard on the television growing up reminded them that it was a celebration “with tears in your eyes”, and by the time they grew up it would be burned into their brains that they needed to make sure the Motherland never had to go through that again.

In 1990, when Germany was reuniting and the Soviet Union was experiencing a near total economic collapse, they were nervous. Germany did a lot of bad things to Russia. The people on the street then were talking openly about how Germany financed the Bolsheviks in the first place, which was like a third German invasion in a way. The US negotiated with the USSR for a reunited Germany to join NATO. NATO, that military alliance that was formed to stop the Soviet Union. It was created specifically to be their enemy.

They weren’t comfortable with Germany reuniting and joining NATO, but it was hard to try to stop it because the country was on the verge of bankruptcy then. It was pulling apart at the seams, with massive shortages of basic supplies, ethnic separatism in the various republics, violence, and rising crime levels. That year would see the Baltic republics declare independence and the first stirrings of a civil war that would engulf Georgia. Armenia and Azerbaijan were starting to fight over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. Worse still, the Party functionaries were too corrupt and ineffectual to stop it.

An informal, verbal agreement was reached that NATO wouldn’t expand eastwards from Germany. That was some consolation; at least the old Warsaw Pact nations would act as a buffer between Russia and NATO.

Not long after that, the unthinkable occurred. Gorbachev was in the process of renegotiating a new Union treaty that would resolve the growing problems with separatism, when a group of inept hardliners tried to stage a coup and failed spectacularly. Overnight, the country imploded. The economy collapsed. By way of example, if you had saved up 10,000 rubles by that point, which would have been $14,000 at the official exchange rate in 1988. By 1991, it’s worth $10. Private savings were wiped out. Old people starved to death in their apartments and died because they couldn’t afford basic medicines like blood pressure pills. University professors ended up begging on the streets or drinking themselves to death. School teachers turned to prostitution to get by. The worst and most violent people suddenly became rich because they were willing to break the law and kill anyone who complained.

Almost all industry collapsed because supply chains crossed borders that used to be within the Soviet Union, but which had overnight become international borders. Millions of ethnic Russians woke up to find out that they were suddenly living “abroad”. In some countries, like Latvia, that meant they had been disenfranchised because only those who spoke Latvian received citizenship. Russians fled other places, like Tajikistan, with only the clothes on their backs as that newly created nation erupted in a civil war between Islamists and secularists. Suicide rates skyrocketed. Mafia killings became a part of everyday life as gangs fought for control of lucrative industries. Everything was for sale at rock bottom prices. Army base commanders sold tanks and helicopters to shady groups in semiautonomous regions, and anyone selling aluminum or oil expected assassination attempts on an almost daily basis.

Russia turned to the US for help. The US decided that it would send some economists to “teach the Russians how to build a market economy”. They were promptly accused of enriching themselves at Russia’s expense. The US also demanded that Russia assume all of the Soviet Union’s international debts, thereby creating a windfall for the other Soviet republics and crippling Russia further.

The Russians had no choice, though. They needed the help. It was humiliating for Russia, but Russians were used to being blamed for the Soviet system. Trying to point out that all the ethnicities of the USSR participated in its horrors was too long of a story to tell. The fact that Stalin was a Georgian, and Khrushchev a Ukrainian, meant nothing. Russians knew it, too. They were watching pirated Hollywood movies on bad VHS tapes with monotone Russian dubbing. They became acquainted very quickly with all the negative stereotypes. Russians were evil. Russians were responsible for all the horrors of communism. But at least they got to watch Schwarzenegger movies and German porn. That surely made the complete breakdown of society palatable, right?

They didn't get any help from the US, though. They just got lots of preaching at them about how they needed to be more like the West. They begged the US to abolish the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, a punishing ban on the export of high technology to the USSR in retaliation for the Soviet Union not letting Jewish citizens emigrate to the West or Israel if they wanted to. Russia didn’t have any bans on anyone leaving anymore. Russians were leaving in droves for Israel and the West as it was. Why was the ban still in place? Didn’t the US want Russia to become prosperous and stable?

Russia tried to show it could play the West's game. It stopped blocking any actions by the West in the UN or elsewhere and it joined the Council of Europe, a human rights group. It suspended the death penalty despite the fact that it needed strong punishments for the growing mafia problem in an attempt to show it was willing to go by the rules that the West set up.

The most it got were some loan deferrals and frozen chicken leg quarters from the US. And an earful of preaching.

The years went by and Russia’s problems continued. Shady privatization schemes saw huge and valuable state enterprises owned by a few rich “oligarchs”, as they became called. The economy collapsed again a few times, not quite as spectacularly, but by way of example someone who had saved up another 10,000 rubles by 1997 through a lot of work, which was about $2,500 in 1997, would find in August 1998 when the ruble collapsed that the value of their savings dropped to about $600.

It seemed like nothing was ever going to get better. A disastrous war in Chechnya, Yeltsin growing increasingly drunk and the never-ending parade of prime ministers, rumblings that parts of Russia were getting ready to break away, and the continuing crime, were taking a toll on the country.

And yet, all Bill Clinton cared about was arms control. No support for Russia, no attempts at helping Russia become prosperous or even stable. To the contrary - the Russians uncovered evidence that the CIA was operating a rat line from the US Embassy in Georgia (a country that used to be part of the USSR just a few years before this) to fund the Chechen jihadis, all at the same time that Madeleine Albright was attempting to demand that Russia negotiate peace with the Chechen rebels. Russia said "no" for perhaps the first time since 1991 and knew that it ruined any good relations with the Clinton administration that remained.

Around that same time, the US bombed Serbia over Kosovo. There was no international consensus on doing it and no UN resolution, nothing to tie the actions to international law. And it was NATO that did it. NATO, that in that same year expanded to the East and now included Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, former Warsaw Pact "buffer states" to Russia's mind.

The adoring love of American culture had faded almost completely. They still hadn’t removed Jackson-Vanik. They were interfering in Russia's internal affairs over Chechnya, trying to force Russia to capitulate and providing material support to its enemies. Worse, General Alexander Lebed had negotiated something of the sort in 1996 to end the first Chechen War. The Chechens got de facto independence, but in the intervening years they had returned to their old ways of making money, crossing the border and kidnapping Russians for ransom, running drugs and selling weapons. They still tried to say they were Russia's friend, though.

They were bombing Serbia, a country with a strong connection to Russia due to similar histories, religion and language. They told Russia Serbia was bad and killed a lot of Albanians. Russia reminded them that Serbia was willing to acquiesce to autonomy for Kosovo, but they asked to remain in control of their international borders, they wanted Russian troops alongside the NATO troops that would enter Kosovo and they wanted protection for the Serbian population. Madeleine Albright said “no” to all those conditions. Why was the US dictating terms without a UN resolution? Because we can, they replied, honestly. But don’t worry, we’re the good guys, and we’re your friend.

But why did the US let Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into NATO? Didn’t they promise not to do that? The Clinton administration just shrugged and said, “Can you find the agreement that says that? We’re not aware of any treaty that binds us to do that. But don’t worry, we’re your friend.”

Around this time Russia came to the realization that the US continued to treat Russia as an adversary despite Russia having done pretty much nothing to justify that. The ideological threat of communism was gone, Russia kept bending over backwards not to cause problems with the West and yet at every turn Russia got screwed. The US acted unilaterally to defend its interests first, then came up with some rationalization after the fact.

It was around that time that Yeltsin appointed a new prime minister, Vladimir Putin, and announced that Putin would be his successor. No one really knew who Putin was but he flew down to the Chechen border in a jet fighter and said Russia was going to piss on the Chechen terrorists (a phrase that also meant to kill them but was unheard of from a politician). The Russian army went back into Chechnya. The locals in the first villages asked how long the Russians were going to stay, and the commander said, “forever”. Putin finally established some order. Because of the state of the Russian army, it meant that Russia essentially shelled Grozny into rubble and slaughtered boatloads of Chechens, but Russia started to fix its problems. It started rebuilding infrastructure, cleaning up the country (literally and figuratively) and cracked down massively on the mafia.

On 9/11, however, Putin reacted as a person. He was the first foreign leader to call George W. Bush and he pledged Russian assistance. He thought that finally the Americans understood. There would be no more CIA rat lines funding Chechen terrorists after this (that didn't pan out, according to Russia). Russia offered the US logistical and supply support for Afghanistan and negotiated with the newly independent Central Asian states to allow the US to put military supply bases in territory that used to be Soviet. It was unheard of. The Russians also agreed to cooperate on intelligence gathering (they tipped us off to the Boston marathon bombers, among others).

Not only that, but ordinary Russians were devastated by 9/11. They bought flowers and took them to the US Embassy. People were crying everywhere, lighting candles and showing solidarity with the US. Look up the pictures. They're stunning.

And how did the US repay Russia? 1. By expanding NATO again, this time to include the Baltics. 2. By invading Iraq, a country the Russians had billions of dollars of oil contracts with. 3. By suggesting a missile defense shield be put in Poland that was definitely designed to counter Russia's nuclear deterrent. Oh, and all the US cared about in talks with Russia was disarmament, as usual.

Iraq was particularly humiliating for Russia. It didn't veto the UN resolutions against Iraq but the US knew that Russia remained dependent on the oil and gas sector for a lot of its income. It also ended up making deals with countries that the US didn't deal with generally because it couldn't compete with US arms dealers, oil companies, etc.

Russia managed to pay off all its debts, though, even though the West didn't help it. Russia learned it had to help itself. Russia had also been studying how the US operated and was starting to come to the conclusion that the US would never love Russia or accept Russia, or even care about what happened in Russia that didn't have to do with nuclear weapons.

The US definitely had a hand in overthrowing Russia-friendly leaders in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004 and again in 2014) and Kyrgyzstan (2005). The last mentioned revolution occurred because the US didn't want to close the Manas airbase in Kyrgyzstan.

The missile defense shield plans were delayed and then back on track. NATO expanded again. NATO said it wanted Georgia and Ukraine to join. This crossed a red line for Russia with respect to the defense of its own country. Would the US stand by idly if Canada signed a defense treaty with China that would allow the People's Liberation Army to station 10 tank brigades in Manitoba?

And every time the Russians mentioned all this the US would say, "But we're the bastion of democracy, we can do this. You can't. But don't worry, we're your friend."

So after all this crap, after all the years of seeing how the US operated, Russia finally decided it had had enough. It had to stop simply buckling under as the US encroached on Russia's territory, or it would find NATO with tanks on the east bank of the Dnepr and no natural boundaries to keep them from Moscow, pipelines through the Caucasus that would destroy Russia's sources of income and bankrupt it again, and a color revolution that would put some US puppet in control of the country.

So, when in 2008 Georgia launched an attack on Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Russia decided it was time to act [NOTE: in 1991 Georgia, immediately following independence, descended into a brutal civil war as its first popularly elected president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, decided to favor ethnic Georgians over minorities such as the Abkhaz and Ossetians. In 1993 a ceasefire was reached that saw a UN treaty put Russian peacekeepers in the provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia to protect the minorities there. In 2008 Georgian President Saakashvili attempted to retake the territories despite the fact he knew the peacekeepers were still there, legally and under UN mandate]. Russia beat back the Georgian attack and started moving to take the capital, Tbilisi. Putin told Sarkozy he was going to capture Saakashvili, try him and then hang him the way the Americans hanged Saddam. Horrified, the French begged him to stop. He did.

However, now Putin was called an "aggressor". Russia was an aggressive threat. After kicking Russia around for around 17 years and treating it like shit, Russia kicked back and all the hawks who had been saying that we shouldn't trust Russia, that we couldn't trust Russia, pointed to the Georgia war and said "See?! We told you so!" John McCain was loudest in that because he always hated Russia, but there were plenty of others. It didn't matter that the US had bases all over former Soviet territory, that NATO had expanded to just a few miles from St. Petersburg, Russia's second largest city and former capital and that it was talking about putting a missile defense shield in Europe. Russia was the bad guy (because the US can't ever be the bad guy).

Then, in 2012, Russia bankrolled the pro-Russian presidential candidate in Ukraine who had "won" the 2004 election before protests forced a revote that he lost. Viktor Yanukovich won because the Eastern Ukrainians never liked being forced to use the Ukrainian language (they all spoke Russian) and they didn't like the glorification of pro-Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera on the part of Western Ukrainians. They also essentially kept the Ukrainian economy afloat since all the heavy industry was in the East of Ukraine.

So, when Yanukovich was forced into a bad situation by the EU over a treaty on closer relations (the EU had initially said he could sign that treaty AND an economic treaty with Russia that would massively benefit East Ukraine, then pulled the rug out from under him at the last minute), he refused to sign and signed only the economic treaty with Russia. That led to protests and he ultimately fled the country. Phone intercepts proved (and were never refuted by the US) that the US had funded and directed the protests to remove Yanukovich.

The new interim government in Ukraine was too open about its relationship with the US. It immediately asked to join NATO, it promised to kick the Russian Black Sea fleet out of Sevastopol in Crimea, it offered to give the base to the US instead and it wanted to ban use of the Russian language.

This crossed so many red lines for Russia it is hard to count them. NATO on the east bank of the Dnepr, loss of Crimea, loss of the naval base, putting NATO bases in their place, opportunities for deep espionage against Russia, threats to Russia's natural resources...the list goes on and on.

Putin did what he thought would be the least invasive options that would protect Russia while not invading all of Ukraine. He seized Crimea in a bloodless operation and then he created a separatist threat in East Ukraine on a base of genuine popular support for Russia in the area. The unwritten rule of NATO is that no country can join that has unresolved territorial conflicts (this was probably part of the reason Saakashvili launched his attack on Abkhazia and South Ossetia - he gambled that if he won fast enough, he would present Russia with a fait accompli).

But now Russia was called the aggressor again, even though NATO ships pushed up to the boundaries of Russia's territorial waters and were just a cunt hair away from putting bases in Crimea.

Because the threat from NATO doesn't seem to be going away, Russia keeps upping the ante. You can interfere in our interests in the Middle East? Fine. We'll interfere with yours. Here's Syria. You interfere in elections? Fine. We'll interfere with yours. Here's the DNC server, Wikileaks.

So if you look at all this, what does Russia want? It doesn't want the US fucking around near Russia. This isn't about "spheres of influence" as much as it is about not threatening Russia. It wants the US to stop interfering in the region generally. It wants NATO to stop expanding eastwards because that's a threat. And if the US refuses to do that, then Russia will use whatever tools are at its disposal to try to even the playing field. It also wants the US to consult with Russia on geopolitical events that Russia has an interest in. Russia isn't Belgium; it has a massive army, nuclear arsenal and economy and it wants to be treated like a world power. It doesn't have to be considered a "superpower", but it doesn't want to be treated like an afterthought.

The thing is that if Congress would just shut the fuck up and let Trump meet with Russia it's likely we could agree on all these points. Trump has already shown more common courtesy by noting it has a massive nuclear arsenal and saying he wants to get along with Russia.

If we were to enter into a binding treaty approved by the Senate that would forego NATO expansion into any former Soviet republics that aren't already members, limit NATO's presence in the Baltics and create a semi-permanent set of buffer states in the form of Ukraine and Belarus, and if the US agreed to not put any military bases in Central Asia, then I think the situation would be nearly totally diffused.