Thinking Like a Russian
▻http://permaculturenews.org/2014/03/17/thinking-like-russian
So why should the Russians feel compelled to interfere with the internal politics of Ukraine? Why should they respond so militantly to the ouster of a pro-Russian (and legally elected) Ukrainian president by pro-western insurgents?
To understand this, we must, of course, look back at recent history.
Twice in the past century, German troops rolled across the plains of Poland and Ukraine to attack Russia. In the previous century, Napoleon’s army did the same. In the latest of these invasions, as many as twenty-five million Soviet citizens perished, including about ninety percent of the male cohort born from 1920 to 1923. So Russians have good reason for concern about the security of their western border and are eager to establish and support non-threatening regimes along that border, which is precisely what they did by establishing the Warsaw Pact in 1955 to counter NATO.