The experience of WW2 left a deep psychological scar in Soviet, and later Russian statesmen, in that the lesson they took away from it was "We need to be surrounded by buffer and satellite states, so that in a war, they will bleed, instead of us." It's why they had absolutely zero patience for Georgia and Ukraine turning West-wards.
The scar it left on the population at large was "They attacked us, and we suffered a lot, but then we really showed them."
I suspect that due to the scale of destruction, WW2 left a deep psychological scar on the psyche of soviet countries, much deeper than anywhere else. And maybe that's why Russia has had such a militaristic and aggressively paranoid posture ever since.
Russia has been that way since at least the Mongols. It’s a property of their location - difficult to defend central plains, on the path of many invaders and with harsh unyielding winters.
Over time, the scar transformed into a state religion in the USSR: obsessive celebration of all kinds of anniversaries, children tortured in schools with made up stories of heroism, huge monuments everywhere, TV and cinemas filled with endless stream of most inane morally black-and-white WWII movies like the worst cowboy flicks. Instead of Sunday church, I had to sit in school listening to senile veterans who had never seen frontline action (but had their chest full of anniversary medals) tell fairy tales how they single-handedly destroyed 50 Tiger tanks and 100 planes and then threw themselves in front of a machine gun nest to save their comrades, but stepped on a mine while doing so and lost both legs and crawled for a week back to their unit, successfully avoiding German patrols.
By the 1970s, the WWII mythology (of which a lot was entirely made up) had formed the core of the identity of "Soviet people" and an excuse for everything. The narrative of "Soviet people as the victors of the WWII" acted as a God-given right to stomp over other nations, because after all, only a fascist would resist the glorious Soviet people. The way we see Zelenskyy, a Jewish comedian, branded as a Nazi, and the war against Ukraine propagandized as a "holy war against Nazism like our grandfathers fought", is an echo of that. Doesn't make any sense unless you are familiar with the warped Soviet WWII mythology.
Aggressive militarism is common in post-war generations that grew up with the simplistic brainwashing. There was very little militarism in the generation that actually saw the war, because the Eastern front was morally an ambiguous place. One of my older relatives fought in the battle of Velikiye Luki. He always suspected that his unit had been placed on purpose into a very poor position to wipe them out with German hands for earlier insubordination. The unit got hit hard, he got wounded and was taken prisoner by Germans. Weeks or months later Soviets overran German positions and he was reunited.
As a punishment for being taken prisoner, he was moved to a penal battalion, because not fighting until your death was officially declared treason. Penal battalion was a lighter punishment. Those who had panicked were executed. Penal battalions were "dumb meat" used to dig or dismantle fortifications under enemy fire, and attack in first waves to identify machine gun nests and minefields. If they didn't attack with enough enthusiasm, then the barrier troops placed behind them would open fire. (This practice lives on, as can be seen in Ukraine.) By some miracle, he survived it all. Most didn't. You can imagine how keen he was to put on his uniform, parade around on the V-E day celebrations and listen to speeches how "the Soviet people fought united like one man against Nazi invaders".
And not only do they cosplay in wartime uniforms, but they also the adopt the language of propagandized version of history that they've only witnessed from movies, and go around yelling how Russia is fighting Nazis again and "we won't stop before Berlin".
In a way, that's even understandable. Pre-USSR history is beyond living memory, and USSR put a lot of effort into creating a cultural disconnect with pre-1917 Russia. Older history offers no strong identity, it's just too far away to be relevant, it's hard for modern urban population to identify with either the imperial nobility or with peasantry. Modern Russia offers no identity either beyond "superyacht for me and poverty for thee". So what's left? Only the militaristic propagandized USSR victory narrative that so many cling to, otherwise they'd have no identity at all, because that's the only meaningful thing in the past century of Russian history.
Russia is a country with fluid borders and could not allow NATO troops and Rockets in Ukraine in the same way, as we could not accept rockets in Cuba.
The war has gone bad for the West now. The EU has very little equipment left. Russia loses more tanks in a month than many big EU countries have. Germany had ammunition for two days of war. After giving a lot to Ukraine, they have ammunition for one day of war left.
Graham's meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Kyiv on May 26
“and the Russians are dying ...the best money we've ever spent.”
Before you downvote you may look up who Emmanuel Todd is. When he was a 25y old PhD student in 1976 he predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is not a person to be taken lightly.
This is still conflating the USSR and Russia. The Russian SFSR, AFAICT, had exactly the same borders as Russia did before it started biting off pieces of its neighbors.
No, you're wrong here. Russian SFSR initally included the whole Central Asia, Caucasus countries, Crimea and eastern parts of Ukrainian SSR. Russian SFSR border you talking about is from circa 1956.
Indeed, after the slaughter of WW2 you would expect Russians to be wary of starting wars by invading their neighbours.