These are some good links and good information you provided. Thank you. It definitely fills out the broad outline. Specifically the Russian history timeline. It’s easy to forget that from the Mongols to the Nazis the invasion paranoia in Russia is alive and well. It’s woven into their national consciousness and we can’t get rid of it.
This gets into Russia’s long-term strategic goals. To listen to some geopolitical analysts, Russia, is in its death throes. Demography is upside down: essentially no kids and a crappy life expectancy. They simply don’t have the people to populate the country and their armed forces will suffer and their borders will become weak and open to invasion, again.
If you consider the Islamist threat to Europe I suspect that this is what occupies Putin’s mind to a large extent. So the old ‘buffer state’ strategy is in place. How much of that is based on NATO and EU expansion or on potential Islamist invasion is anybody’s guess. But I think it’s fair to say Putin views it as a double threat.
I was just reading this, which makes a point relevant to Russia's long-term strategic goals: "The Kremlin has designated energy security as the primary issue for Russia's national security, especially since recent changes in global and domestic trends have cast doubts on the energy sector's continuing strength."
The Past, Present and Future of Russian Energy Strategy. This has a bearing on the Islamist issue to the extent that the Middle East figures into Russian energy policy, so the two things seem related. More specifically, after the Soviet Union broke up, there was a race between American and Russian companies to gain control of oil-rich areas in former Soviet territory bordering on the Middle East, with an eye towards controlling new pipelines being planned in the area. For both Russia and America, the Islamists are pawns in this Great Game. America and the EU have been trying to form a "Middle Eastern Union" modelled on the EU, which I believe was part of the thinking behind the Obama administration's policy of promoting regime change in north Africa, Syria, and Turkey. For Russia, on the other hand, the traditional Iranian-Syrian alliance forms a counterweight to Western influence in the region, and pushing American/EU influence out of Iraq and Turkey is a goal. Towards this end, Russia has been supporting Iranian nuclear development and the Assad regime, despite Putin's aversion to Islam, because it serves to counter American influence. Meanwhile, Obama has been using the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda, and ISIS to promote a Sunni-controlled superstate that would be a Middle Eastern version of the EU and essentially fill the void left by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. There are some other factors, but I think that brings some pieces of the big picture into focus, at least.