Realpolitik would be to arm yourself and project your influence like your big brothers are doing next door and across the pond.
Russia would love to regain the European land the Soviet Union lost.
Russia would love to regain the European land the Soviet Union lost.
And Putin is not an idiot to attempt expansion to lands with no ethnic-russian population. Such thing is clearly not feasible without the power structures of the former USSR.
People like to think that if they would have assassinated Hitler early on, WW2 wouldn't have happened, but that's wrong. That would have just left the power vacuum empty for someone else to capitalize on the German populations' grievances and start the war.
The history lesson is to make sure the masses of people are taken care of by their leaders, not to start censoring, imprisoning or assassinating political opponents who capitalize on the peoples' unhappiness.