To start, we need to understand why and how the Soviet Union collapsed and how the trauma of collapse shaped how Putin, his allies and millions of Russians came to view the world. Putin described Soviet collapse as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”. “Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory”. An “epidemic of collapse” as he called it, spilled into Russia, threatening its very existence. The 1990s are remembered as a traumatic time for most Russians in which quality of life and rule of law fell apart. Savings and job security evaporated. Rates of poverty, alcoholism and mortality increased. Average life expectancy fell by nearly five years. Russia's population declined. Putin came to power as prime minister at the end of that turbulent decade in 1999 and became president the following year. His presidency was defined by that backdrop; Putinism was all about reversing that catastrophe and restoring Russian pride by rebuilding the state to its former glory. What that meant exactly evolved over time, but Putinism always held Russia of the 1990s as its antithesis. Humiliation, decay, poverty and death are indelibly connected to state weakness, liberalism, democracy, and all things “Western” in the Putinist view of politics.

The collapse of communism sparked violent conflict and Russia used war, and proxies, to protect its interests. The collapse of the USSR unleashed powerful centrifugal forces that Moscow struggled to contain. Even then, Soviet and then Russian governments exhibited an interest in holding onto as much of the USSR as possible, especially those areas where Russians, Russian-speakers, and Russian allies lived, under Moscow's influence. They used force where they could, force moderated principally not by morality or political intent but by crippling incapacity. A will to fight unmatched by the capacity to do so was a recurrent theme, which stretched from Lithuania to the failed August 1991 coup, to Chechnya. Only against the unarmed, the very lightly armed, or other elements of its own enormous military institution did the Soviet and then Russian armies enjoy much success in the 1990s. But it was not for want of trying.