Russians themselves remember the hell that was 90s (westerners do not fully grasp how bad this decade was) when the USSR was balkanized and Russia was taken over by an American puppet.
Theyre determined not to have a round two.
It looks like this time the russians will enjoy the North Korean experience as well. Why would anyone be interested to deal with Russia after this invasion of Ukraine?
Factually, there are opportunities and animosities and hard choices that conditioned explicit positions.
You may want to believe Yeltsin was a US puppet all you want.
That does not change the fact that when the USSR fell, and nations had to compete on an international market, the industry of all Warsaw pact nations was utterly uncompetitive.
That does not change that there is corruption in all levels of Russian administration, and for all this time they have been a drain on Russian people and its economy.
Putin just pivoted a balanced but failing state into a petrostate with him as the head mafioso.
Want to not be easily destabilised? Choose a more reliable and accountable government. Russia had some chances for that. Now Putin has enshrined in law his rulership until his death.
The Russians could have carried on with the previous hybrid war strategy, buying off politicians in the West, spreading their narratives, not-so-secretly augmenting the strange DNR and LNR entities in their chronic war with Ukraine, helping the Germans and others become ever more dependent on cheap Russian natural gas etc.
But they had to go all in with 200 000 soldiers and try to conquer a big country that hates them and would be uncontrollable even if they actually managed to take it.
In Russian paranoid mind, yes.
In practice, former USSR countries or Finland are joining NATO precisely to be protected from some "brotherly help and selfless liberation" dispensed by the Kremlin several decades down the line.
A collective entity like NATO would have to become collectively mad (not just one president, but many of them) to actively attack Russia, which still has a massive stockpile of nuclear weapons, theoretically capable of wiping humans off the Earth several times over.
And what would the casus belli even be? The only thing Russia surely has is plentiful natural resources, and it is cheaper and easier just to buy them than to wage an extremely costly and destructive war. The main mining/production regions are deep inland anyway, thousands of miles away from NATO borders.
Unless you buy their idea that "those scheming Westerners envy us our eternal glory and want to force limp-wristed decadent postmodernism and LGBT on us", there are no reasons to attack Russia.