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."