Putin's wars have consistently coincided with periods of declining popularity: 2008 invasion of Georgia when unpopular, 2014 Crimea invasion when ratings were plummeting, and 2022 invasion when Navalny opposition was returning and discontent was overflowing onto streets.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was not foreseen as inevitable by those living through the late 1980s, despite hindsight making it appear obvious; it came out of the blue in August 1991.

The West preached to the vanquished after the Cold War, which was strategically counterproductive; Americans and Western politicians treated Russia's transformation as a triumph of Western values rather than recognizing it came from within Russia itself.

Yeltsin's complicity in 1990s corruption in the Kremlin delegitimized Western-style capitalist democracy in Russia; when Putin came to power in 2000, he was positioned to restore order through a return to centralized control, and the public was receptive to this.

While China-Russia partnership offers China political opportunity to play a larger role on the world stage, there is significant rhetoric in these games that is 'little more than rhetoric'—the durability of the China-Russia alliance is uncertain.

Two FSB agents in a conversation joke about political honesty under Putin's regime by demonstrating the logical impossibility of honest speech: Dimitri asks Ivan what he really thinks about Putin, Ivan says the same as you do, and Dimitri arrests him for sedition—illustrating how even agreeing is punished.

While Western failures in post-Soviet policy may have contributed to resentment, the primary responsibility for Putin's anti-Western stance lies with Putin himself and his circle, not with the West's handling—Western treatment was not helpful but was not the fundamental cause of Putin's aggression.

The Cold War was driven by ideology and the clash of political and social systems, but the current Russia-West conflict under Putin is driven by personal hurt Putin felt at the end of the Soviet Union, which he took as personal humiliation.

Putin has enriched himself from state monies that should have been spent on infrastructure, health services, and pensions; as a dictator worried about losing power, starting wars serves to distract from unpopularity caused by this corruption.

The 1990s in Russia was capitalism 'in red in tooth and claw,' with no established safeguards, resulting in business disputes being settled with machine guns and no sense of where the system was going; this chaos gave capitalism and democracy a bad name.

Gorbachev granted glasnost (right to talk about things) not intending communism to collapse but rather to strengthen communism and the Soviet Union; by unleashing free speech he 'let the genie out of the bottle' and lost control of the reform process.

Western observers and journalists in the late 1980s and early 1990s were self-deluded in believing that Russia would become like Western liberal democracies after communism fell; this delusion lasted into Putin's early years when he paid lip service to liberal democracy.

China has historically played the role of 'wild card' in US-Soviet/Russian geopolitical dynamics since the Nixon-Kissinger era; China is good at exploiting this position and sees economic opportunity in supplying Russia while the West cuts it off.

Khodorkovsky could have escaped Russia with substantial wealth intact but consciously chose to stay and face imprisonment knowing he would receive harsh punishment from Putin—this choice to stay and sacrifice for his values demonstrates idealism rather than opportunism.