[duckln]

I don't think the USSR ever had an empire in the sense that the UK, Germany, France, Spain and the Dutch had.

Today the empire builders are the Islamists and NATO. Not Russia. They have so much resources of their own to exploit, they don't need more. Putin is protecting what they have.

[elhombrelibre]

The Soviet Union was not an empire? Wow, that sentiment is beyond believe. I'm floored. I guess you think all of its member states willingly joined the Soviet Union. Was that why they needed an Iron Curtain to prevent people from leaving it's non-empire. You probably don't think they had a secret police, a GULAG, or an unfree country either. And what Putin does today is just defensive in nature because Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Georgia, and Ukraine are picking on poor Putin, in your mind.

[elhombrelibre]

You must have really been upset when Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” Not only did he disparage the great nation Putin loved, the nation whose collapse Putin called the greatest tragedy of the 20th CEN, but he misdefined what an empire is, in your view.