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I think I have to explain a bit, since I too have mixed feelings about the collapse of the FSU.

Communism was evil and it is good that is is gone. Remember, it was Russians and other peoples of the FSU, but mainly Russians, who ultimately crashed the Communism. You may think that you have won the Cold War. The point is, in march harder circumstances, between WWI and WWII, as well as after the WWII, the Soviet Union survived. The demise of Communism was decided in Russia, and you must admit it. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union is a bit different story.

The Soviet Union was created as a successor of the Russian Empire, which was the Russian national state for a very long time. Furthermore, the Bolshevik revolution was very bad for the development of Russia. In the words of Sir Winston Churchill, the Bolsheviks sunk the Russian ship in view of the harbour. Creation of the Communist Soviet Union in place of the ancient Russian state was a tragedy for the Russian nation. However, in a sense, the Soviet Union was the successor of the national Russian state and it is exactly in this sense that its collapse is felt as a great tragedy. You know, suppose the South had won in the Civil War and split from the US. Would it be a pain for all Americans? You might not give a damn about Canada but suppose Quebec will cede, which is now again a very real threat. Should all Canadians celebrate this fact? Do you understand that Ukraine means maybe more to Russia than Quebec means to Canada?

Having said that, there is no way Ukraine or anybody else can be or will be forced to form the Soviet Union again. However, it is the duty of any Russian leader to do everything possible to built up and strengthen friendly and close ties between Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia and Kazakhstan. Not by force but by mutual agreement based on common culture and history. Putin is by the way guilty of neglecting this duty. It will take years to repair the damage he did to the Russian-Ukrainian relations. Russia shall become again attractive to the former Soviet republics by becoming again, as it was in the beginning of the 1990s, a leader among the former Soviet states in cultural and economic development, as well as in freedoms and democracy. Putin is guilty of not understanding this.

Boor Person,

Did you mean to use "Boar" , not "Boor"?

Boorish would be self-deprecating and not at all descriptive of your intelligence.

In any case, Russia's "loss" of Ukraine is a non sequitor as it was never owned by the Kremlin. It was subjugated by the Kremlin for many years and I think Russia can possibly survive only if it stops the hemmoraging with its silly aspirations of imperialism.

It is in fact more probable that Russia will not survive as it is morally bankrupt and incapable of modern infrastructures that rely on trust and not despotism.
See Banfield.

"His greatest book was one of his earliest, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, published in 1958. Researched and written with his wife, Laura, the book asked why a hilltown in Southern Italy, where Ed and his family had spent nine months living among and interviewing the inhabitants, was so poor. It wasn't because of class structure, as Marx would have insisted, nor because of the lack of national economic planning, as the New Dealers and contemporary development economists would have claimed. Ed argued, instead, that the region's poverty had a "moral basis." He showed that at the root of their squalor was the inhabitants' refusal to trust, and hence to cooperate, with anyone who was not a member of their immediate family.

This "amoral familism," as Ed called it, doomed the people to economic backwardness and political irrelevance. Unless this culture could be changed (and Banfield did not think it could, except slowly and over time), no amount of economic planning, income redistribution, or moral exhortation would turn these fatalistic villagers into eager citizens and entrepreneurs."

This is sad because the doomed Russians are not entirely deserving of this fate.