The real reason for all this trouble between Russia and America can be found in framing military analysis of Halford Mackinder's treatise of 1904, amended in 1919.
It is about the timeless struggle between land and sea powers and how eastern europe, ukraine, georgia, the caucuses, and beyind is "The Geographical Pivot of History", as he called this frontier "seam" in 1904, before updating to The Heartland theory in 1919: the World Island, the Inner Crescent, the Outer Crescent.
His most fundamental idea is that a land power will beat a sea power, because it has a defendable border and near unlimited resources. Russia's defendable border is very far from Moscow, which is why Russia has gained the reputation of being an expansionist power.
Russia is flat steppe for thousands of kilometers, which is difficult to defend ... until you get to the natural defences. But those natural defences contain gaps which Russia is keen to plug. Let's trace Russia's borders:
The Baltic Sea with the chokepoint Danish Straits, the Gulf of Finland, the hundreds of kilometers of forests and swamps, along which Finland is busy, pointlessly far as a rational person can see, building a fence as well as stocking up on expensive and provocative new nuclear "defences" from the American arms industry.
The famous Suwałki Gap, a narrow strip of land about 65 kilometers wide between Lithuania and Poland bordering Kaliningrad. Then the heavily militarised Russian exclave of Kaliningrad itself.
The Carpathians, mountains that extend through Moldova, Poland, Ukraine, Romania, and Slovakia.
The Dniester river, Pripyat marshes, Vistula river, Dnieper river, Southern Bug, Danube.
Russia has been invaded over 50 times by armies passing through the gaps in its natural defences. For the story, this included Canada, and Sweden twice. So these would be Russia's natural borders, collectively forming a series of defensive lines that have historically been used to protect from invasions and to control the movement of armies between the Baltic and Black Seas.
Then beyond the Black Sea things get a little more complex, with a mix of mountainous terrain, rivers, and vast steppe lands, with the Caucuses mountains, the Volga river, the Caspian sea and the Ural mountains.
The Caucuses' strategic position as a buffer zone against Middle East madness, its wealth of natural resources, but its complex ethnic, religious and political landscape. The powerful neighbours beyond the Caucuses and across history: the Persians, Ottomans, Mongols, more recently the Chechen wars.
Massive country, massive borders, massive threats. Russia has always had this reputation of being an expansionist power - this expanionist tendency is not without reason nor limit, as the above long list of imperfect natural defenses and their exploitation by various invading armies, shows.
But Russia is still around after over a thousand years and so while you should never doubt the word of the Chinese, similarly you should never contemplate invading Russia.
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