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When a country that has expanded its territory for 1000 years (Russia) and is, by itself, 69% of the territory of NATO, combined, and 4x the territory of the EU says it feels threatened, you know it’s lying.

Unfortunately, in most of the U.S., students are only taught the history of Western Europe. Anything about the formation of the states East of Germany isn't taught. Throughout its history, Russia struggled with being backward relative to its Western neighbors. It's expansion to the Baltic, at the expense of Sweden after the Great Northern War, was considered a great accomplishment of Peter the Great's. (He's the guy who had his own son tortured and killed on paranoid suspicion of treason BTW.) Russia's old capitol of St. Petersburg (founded in 1703) is a newer city than the U.S.'s old capitol, Philadelphia (founded in (1682).

After signing "A Treaty of Eternal Peace" with Poland, under Peter the Great, Russia commenced bribing the Lords of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to weaken it, and then took Belarus and Western Ukraine from it in the partitions of Poland between 1772-1795. So in the 1000 year history of Russia, neither Ukraine, Belarus, or the "Novorossiya" region now at issue with Putin's recent annexation of Crimea and the present invasion of Ukraine, were long part of the Russian Empire. (Kalliningrad has been even less.) In short, Putin has been most aggressive attempting to regain control of regions that Russia claims by revanchism with weak historical justification. Remember the former U.S. Zbigniew Brzezinski stated that without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire.

The problem with Russia is not that it has been imposed upon, but that it imposes on others. Part of the Russian mythos, dating back almost a thousand years, and given firm foundation by its vast territorial expanse acquired at swordpoint, is its indomitable martial prowess. In 1898, the Russian General Staff carried out a comprehensive study of Russian warfare since the foundations of the state. In the summary volume, the editor told his readers that they could take pride in their country’s military record and face the future with confidence — between 1700 and 1870, Russia had spent 106 years fighting 38 military campaigns, of which 36 had been “offensive”.

WWII has been improperly taught in the U.S. as being about the harshness of the "Treaty of Versailles", (which was more properly the "Treaty of Peace with Germany", which was one of many treaties of the Versailles Peace Conference). In reality, WWII was caused by Germany and the Soviet Union's desire to conquer its neighbors. The British and French had abandoned their alliances with Poland and Czechoslovakia, emboldening Hitler to consume his neighbors. These two colonial powers never wanted to recreate the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which meant the the Second Polish Republic was left too small to defend itself alone from the more industrially developed Germans and certainly not against Germany, Austria, the Free City of Danzig, Slovakia, and the Soviet Union which all attacked Poland in concert in September 1939. Lenin had offered all of Belarus, and all of Ukraine West of the Dnieper to Poland at Riga in 1921, but that was declined under pressure from the British and French. Had that not happened WWII probably wouldn't have occurred as it did, but that is just so much speculation. That issue recurs at present as Putin had offered to split Ukraine with Poland when Tusk was PM, and Putin has again claimed Eastern Urkaine now.