As is usually the case when monstrous plots are afoot, the villain cheerfully told the world exactly what he was planning to do and why. He wants to recreate the Soviet Union.
Initial "peace proposals" from Russia included a rollback of NATO's military assistance to its 1997 condition, explicitly limiting the sovereignty of Poland and the Baltic states:
It is, of course, absurd to think that Putin would have stopped at Ukraine's borders, if given a free hand (and a functioning army). He is a follower of Alexander Dugin's geopolitical school, in which Russia is the rightful caretaker of "Eurasian" civilization:
I never said that the plan was to use Ukraine as a pawn to get concessions from the West. That was someone else. Putin sees his conquest of Ukraine as a milestone in his own country's spiritual destiny.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/22/putin-...
Initial "peace proposals" from Russia included a rollback of NATO's military assistance to its 1997 condition, explicitly limiting the sovereignty of Poland and the Baltic states:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/17/russia-issues-...
It is, of course, absurd to think that Putin would have stopped at Ukraine's borders, if given a free hand (and a functioning army). He is a follower of Alexander Dugin's geopolitical school, in which Russia is the rightful caretaker of "Eurasian" civilization:
https://theconversation.com/alexander-dugin-eurasianism-and-...