Classic Russian strategy. The USSR lost 20 million people in WWII.
They didn't have a choice. It was a war for their civilizational survival. If they surrendered to Germany, the Western part of the country would have been killed/enslaved, with the rump Eastern part carved up at Germany's leisure.
If they walk out of Ukraine, nothing happens except the killing stops.
Sure. But there was a sense that that was a relic of a bygone age. The role of Russian mothers helping to shame the CCCP into capitulation during Afghanistan is well known. We thought that people would never stand for that kind of bloodshed again.
You even see it still in the western response. "They can't keep this up", or "The people will overthrow Putin!". It's a total failure to comprehend that we are in fact facing an evil that the world has not seen in many generations.
All this talk about history is no more than a central pillar of a Russian propaganda. It needs to justify what state is doing, it needs to find some moral grounds, and it uses history for that. And it is Russian history, which was rewritten for ~1k years each time when tsar changed. It never stopped. So to speak even in 1990s history was in a process of rewriting to show how bad USSR was. And now it is being rewritten to show that Russia didn't failed once, and all its fails are responsibility of "collective West".
Just don't listen when Russians talk about history, and you'll be fine.
> They'd rather burn it down and ruin it completely than lose control.
Yeah-yeah... Putin has no other choices left if he wants to die peacefully. There is a risk for him to end as Muammar Gaddafi did, if he loses this war. No one is happy elites included, give them one chance and they will play a spectacle of brutalizing Putin, freeing Russia from under a heel of a merciless dictator.
Historically, there is a reason for that. Those countries are used as a buffer against an invasion from Western Europe. US and EU officials have tried to convince Putin that this was no longer the case over the years, but he never bought it since NATO continued to expand despite Russian protests.
So you have to ask exactly why Russia protests so strongly about NATO expanding? And why countries on Russia's borders were so eager to join it?
The only way Russia gets "invaded" by the "west" is by redefining its borders to include chunks of Ukraine... and now Ukraine defending itself and its internationally recognized borders is an "invasion" of "Russian sovereignty." Preposterous.
as for the larger “reason” it’s simply human nature. We’ve gotten better over the centuries, but game theory’s core idea is still in play.
I sing to the officers who took pity on the mothers
Я пою офицерам, матерей пожалевшим
By returning their living sons back to them
Возратив им обратно живых сыновей