The average Russian for the better part of a millennium lived as subjects of royalty. The royals and aristocrats weren’t always corrupt and in a pre-modern world that form of government tended toward being practical. When the Kaiser’s army kicked the Romanov Army in August 1914 the end of the Romanov dynasty was greased especially well and eventually the Kaiser would help put V.I. Lenin and the Bolsheviks in power.
Lenin cut a treaty to buy time to reorganize Russian society. The Kaiser got part of Ukraine in exchange for an end to the war on Russia. In Ukraine today a peace should be established with a comparable rationale. The world and Europe need time to reorganize in order to form a stable post-Cold War balance of powers globally. Russia will not stop without the return of the Donetsk, Donbas, Luhansk, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia and other areas of Eastern Ukraine securely within its borders with a non-threatening Western Ukraine beyond the Dnepro.
The communists swiftly and with much loss of life democratized Russia in comparison to the former aristocrat-serfdom, master-slave formed social environment. Plainly there is quite a difference between free enterprise democracy and communism in regard to individual self-determination and freedom to build capital, own private property and so forth, yet on the theoretical equality of the individual citizen in regard to the laws of the land, each shares the idea of social and legal equality. In time Soviet society discovered that communism did not bring a practical citizen’s paradise or optimal environment, and modern Russians being practical in a search for the best way for ordinary citizens to have a good life seemed in the popular realm to defect to the western way of free enterprise and democracy.
A democracy was being built in Russia at Cold War’s end and a free enterprise environment was growing when Boris Yeltsin wrote a new Russian Constitution founded on principles of democracy. The Russian President was given super-powers in order to defend Russia internally and externally while the nation was emerging from its century of neo-autocratic communist leadership and transitioning to democracy building new institutions for governance and taxation internally. Then the west continued expanding N.A.T.O., unified the E.C. to become the E.U. and of course took Ukraine from Russia when it was as weak as a newborn puppy. Those elements would lead eventually to a Russian military effort to secure Ukraine against western hegemony comprising economic and military threats to Russian security.
There is no logical basis for the continuation of the Ukraine war on the basis of forms of governance disputes although those are often revived by Westerners without enough education or objectivity to recognize that Russia made a good faith effort to transition to democracy at the end of the Cold war and has been largely rebuffed by the west that preferred to regard Russia as a Soviet Union trying to recover Eastern European lands it had held in trust for about a half century after the German occupation. Russian leadership gave all of those lands up- returning them to independence, because they were independent nations before the Nazis blitzkrieg to conquest. The leadership of the late Soviet era were seeking glasnost and perestroika- openness and reconstruction and got that in abundance. The west tended to fail to realize that Russians sought the best for its citizens as members of democracy.
They didn’t bargain for a west that would regard them as former and latent communists with mal intent. The policies that have brought maximum sanctions since 2014 when the Russians returned the Crimea to their nation through military action, also drove the Russian toward China for reinforcement. It would have been far better for U.S. interests if Russia had found the United States its ally in security and an adjustment of the Ukraine land distribution at the end of the Cold War instead of an enemy.
