Comment by mopsi

That's what I said: the present-day totalitarian dictatorship in Russia was born out of foreign disregard for the deteriorating human rights situation in Russia, willful ignorance of the usurpation of all formal and informal power structures by KGB old-timers, and indifference to the legitimate security concerns of Eastern Europe. Global big businesses in major countries such as the US and Germany were so eager to cooperate on oil and gas extraction that they ignored how a new Hitler was rising as a result of this short-sightedness.

Russia grew into the cancer that it is today not because it had been under imagined attacks from all sides for decades as you claimed (a favorite trope of many dictators), but because of the opposite: Russia was treated like a savage and uncivilized land from which respect for even the most basic human rights was not demanded as a prerequisite for cooperation. Global big businesses were given access to Russian natural resources at below-market rates, and in return Russian kleptocrats were allowed to skim off the top with impunity and park their loot in NYC penthouses.

We can see the same pattern in the current "peace negotiations": Putin is offering Trump and his business partners a chunk of frozen Russian assets and access to natural resources in occupied parts of Ukraine in exchange for the US pressuring Europe to unfreeze the funds and coercing Ukraine to surrender. Big business gets cheap resources and Putin takes another step toward his dream of an empire. What a lovely alliance of big business and Russian imperialism.