Definitely, this is apart of the world that the Russian Federation can enforce their version of the (now defunct) Monroe Doctrine, that once protected the Americas from encroachments by European powers.
Today, there is no will by the regime now in nominal rule of the territory once known as “the United States of America” to exert that defunct Monroe Doctrine, so what business have they of trying to call out anybody else whom may have territorial ambitions?
The Ukraine, by history and cultural influences, is at a divide between Russian hegemony and a serious yearning to be part of the “Western” world, joining with the former Communist nations that have shed the ideology of Marxism and embraced at least some form of reward system for individual initiative, based on most of the concepts of classic capitalism.
There is not, and never has been, any nation that has practiced all the precepts of classic capitalism, partly because of poor understanding of the benefits from the open and free exercise of individual contract for personal gain, in exchange for unfettered use of capital in promoting that personal gain. The old belief of “those that got it already, have an unfair advantage when it comes to getting more”, is hard to root out, because it predisposes the axiom that the pie is of only limited size. The real growth comes not only from expanding the size of the first pie, but to invent and cultivate a vast number of new pies.
The Russian Federation is trying to reassemble the old Soviet Empire, much like Charlemagne tried to reassemble the western part of the Roman Empire, in some loose assembly of fiefdoms known as the “Holy Roman Empire”, which was neither holy, Roman, or in fact, very much of an empire.