After that things went very wrong, culminating in what we have today. Russia could have been part of the EU, as was certainly possible especially given the completely new dynamic that existed after the fall of the soviet union. That would truly have been a positive project.

I don't know if we could ever have undone the mistakes that were made from 1991 onwards, plenty of people tried to include Russian nationalism into international politics, but by then it was far too late, we were dealing with a mess that we had created.

For the last 10 years they have done the opposite and tried to legitimise themselves against this bogeyman i.e. implicitly stating that your only alternatives are a socially and economically liberal democracy that seems powerless to address systemic issues, or socially reactionary forces.

But the later keeps becoming more prominent due to the failure of the former.

Point 2 I agree with the sentiment.