It’s been that way for my entire life (61 years this month) and before. Can’t imagine what my folks must’ve felt during the Cuban Missile Crisis, with a kid a year and a half old. But the distrust of each country for the other goes back over 100 years at this point in time. It cannot easily be turned around.
However, until very recently I thought that we had a shot at it; the simple fact is that we and Russia were quite friendly toward each other up until the Communists took over. They sold us Alaska, and you don’t do that with a country that you don’t trust. We leased them space in New Jersey to test their artillery with Dupont powder that was hauled from Delaware via rail line. We have common enemies in China and the radical Muslims, and we are both continent-sized powers with a very well educated, mostly white population. It would have been a long process, extending over probably two generations, but if we had the wisdom to start doing a few things together that didn’t require much risk on either side, we could have gradually built up enough trust to at least not be hostile toward each other, and possibly to become a natural allies that we should be now that Communism is gone. Clearly, that’s impossible at this point, especially with the genius Biden calling Putin a war criminal in public - how can you possibly deal with him now? Phucking idiot, he just dumped a bunch of poison down the well, ruining it forever. At this point, the only thing that can possibly bring us together is an alien invasion (and that ain’t bloody likely).
Just as an FYI, my paternal grandparents were born in what is now Ukraine (though they considered themselves Russian, as well as Jewish). The Communist bastards would have executed my grandfather if he didn’t escape from a battlefield where he was picking up their very numerous dead and wounded (because he knew too much just by being there, and because he was using one of the many horses and carts that his father owned that were stolen by them - IOW, great grandpa was a rich capitalist, whose entire family deserved death). He fled to an aunt’s house, got some money to go to America and some gold rubles to bribe guards where necessary - I have the one that hat he didn’t have to spend). He never saw his parents again, and some surviving siblings only once, on a trip back in 1969. That trip, btw, was when he found out that his father didn’t die in 1937 because he was sick (with cancer), but because the NKVD beat him to death for the “crime” of renting out part of his home to have money for food. They had not only taken his horses and carts, but 14 houses that he and his sons built themselves and he rented out, so when he was old and sick he had no income - in 1930’s Ukraine, just coming out of a Stalin-engineered famine. 3/4 of my great grandfather’s descendants were effectively held in a giant open-air prison for 3 generations. So you can probably see where my great love for Communism, it’s sister ideologies and all Leftists comes from.
Note that I have very mixed emotions about Ukraine - it has a long history of pretty severe anti-Semitism, and grandpa got his ass kicked a lot by groups of anti-Jewish kids (though he was proud that “I could always take care of 2 of them myself, but more than that was a problem”). Lots of Ukrainians helped the Germans identify and execute Jews (including some of my distant relatives). But today’s Ukrainians are not those of 80 or 110 years ago - they elected a Jew as their President with nearly a 75% majority. Plus, they’re just a bunch of people who wish to rule themselves…so how can one oppose that?
If you look seriously at the USSR and Russia (both before and after the Soviet era), there simply isn’t any history of a two-party political system (not one that really took hold anyway). Russia has a fascinating history is a very diverse country. When I was last in the Soviet Union in 1990, I had the opportunity to ride the train from St. Petersburg to Novgorod....to Moscow. Coming across the steppe and looked across the grasslands, I couldn’t help but think about our own American plains. They certainly look quite the same.
But Russia is several cultures and identities rolled into one federation. Stalin tried to make every single republic dependent on the other. It was smart for a communist country but after 70 plus years of Soviet control, those antiquated ideas retarded any real progress.
Indeed, some people claim that Europe ends at the Urals — whatever is situated to the East of the Urals isn’t truly European. St. Petersburg is arguably the most European city within all of Russia.
Ukraine has its own unique history and culture. In many ways it was the breadbasket of the old Soviet Union. It has its own proud military history. The fact that Ukraine is fighting hard should not be a surprise to anyone. The bloodiest fights are always those within the family. This is a slavic family after all.
But I get back to my original point. Russia simply has no background or cultural identity that lends itself to democracy. These are people who have been subjugated for centuries from the Tsar to Marxism/Leninism to whatever they are now. I doubt there is any Thomas Jefferson lingering in there (although I was once approached by someone in Moscow who wanted to talk about Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau). He even threw in Adam Smith for good measure. As a parenthetical, remind me to tell you about the time we partied with St. Petersburg Police at high speeds in their police car while our passports where locked in the Intourist safe at the hotel. Good times.