The threat of competition from Ukraine is why Russia siezed Crimea and formented the rebellion in the east in 2014.
Why Russia is Invading Ukraine
That's a good documentary on the importance of Ukrainian oil and gas and what Russia has said historically about it.
[The way to get cheap Russian Energy is to defeat Russia and drive them out of Ukraine, and then help Ukraine get production going from their fields in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea.
The threat of competition from Ukraine is why Russia siezed Crimea and formented the rebellion in the east in 2014.
Why Russia is Invading Ukraine
That’s a good documentary on the importance of Ukrainian oil and gas and what Russia has said historically about it.]
IMHO, many analysts are projecting their middle class material aspirations on a king who has more of everything than he needs in a thousand lifetimes. The one thing he lacks - a pedestal to match Peter the Great’s - is something money alone can’t buy. What money can help him do is finance a campaign for territorial gain at the end of which historians will put him on the pedestal he desires.
There are some who say - what of today’s hue and cry against Putin? Isn’t he ruining his good name? Peter the Great was hated in his lifetime. He killed his own *son*, for crying out loud. He turned the Russian peasantry into chattel slaves in all but name. And yet, despite all that, he is now Peter the Great. Like it or not, territorial expansion is the coin of historical greatness.
In British history, only one ruler has been granted this particular epithet. Was Alfred’s signal achievement the Domesday Book, the pathbreaking land survey of his lands that he commissioned? No - it was his welding of East Anglia, Northumbria, Wessex and Mercia into a single English kingdom, and his temporary taming of the Viking threat to his lands.
There’s a temptation to view this kind of thing as atavistic, a throwback to a more primitive era. In reality, it’s what decides national boundaries, like it or not. You can resist, or you can submit. That’s all there is to it.