If I talk with Western leftists, I often hear from them: "Russia attacks Ukraine due to the political international interests of the country. NATO came close (or wanted to approach) to the borders of Russia and it caused a reaction. What Russia did made sense in terms of national self-interest. It's basically the same logic that was behind the Cuban missile crisis". Similar view is protected by Noam Chomsky
Not at all!
Remember one simple thing: Russia is not the USSR.
Russia was just a gas and petrol station of the European Union and NATO and the best investor of petrodollars to EU economy until the last days.
Half of the Russian exports go to Europe (oil, gas and other raw materials). 80% of demand of Russian industry are foreign and largely European goods (machines and other equipment). 50% of Russia food is imported and a significant part is from on the countries of the European Union. 93% of Russian medicines are either produced abroad or contain foreign components. The largest Russian companies and banks to 2014 took huge amounts of money in the West they total debt is $ 600 billion.
Separate conversation is about Turkey, which has become the enemy of Russia. Turkey was the fifth economic partner of Russia, the largest buyer of Russian grain and supplier of products for the Russian (actually foreign, but located in Russia) car factories.
Russia is one of the most import-dependent countries in the world and the lion's share of this dependence is associated with NATO countries.
The entire Russian elite, oligarchs and bureaucrats keep their money in the United States and the European Union, and their property and their families are there also. For 15 years of Putin's rule they were taken to West about 2 trillion dollars.
What kind of the the confrontation with NATO they cood be involved in these conditions? Kremlin never thought of any real confrontation with NATO! For example, American bases in Afghanistan is supplied through Russia. All Russian top keeps money in banks in NATO countries, taken to these countries their families, buys there property, takes there money and helps to provide weapons to the powerful grouping of NATO near the Russian borders (Afghanistan) for many years. How they could consider the presence of NATO near its borders as a threat?
NATO also has never threatened Russia, on the contrary, NATO was an ally of Kremlin. NATO have a blind eye to human rights violations in Russia, the mass medering in Chechnya, and on Russia's attack on Georgia in 2008. No sanctions! No sanctions although soldiers has killed the Chechens and occupied part of Georgian territory.
Anyone who says about the confrontation between Russia and NATO does not understand anything in contemporary Russian politics.
Only now this confrontation has become real. And just for the reason that Kremlin is not calculated the consequences of his adventurism in Ukraine consequences of the seizure of Crimea and parts of Donbass.
Kremlin did this only in order to avoid a Russian Maidan\Tahrir revolution and to gain popularity inside Russia through Imperial propaganda and war in the face of economic crisis.
This crisis began in 2013. Yes, the crisis started before the sanctions and before the fall in oil prices. According to the estimates of Russian economists, this is structural crisis. There is no way out of the crisis under neo-feudal model of the Russian economy. Sanctions and falling oil prices have strengthened him, but they didn't create him. This crisis and Arab revolutions, as well as the uprising in Ukraine has demanded the Kremlin to respond.
It's what here in Russia called "battle of the television and the refrigerator". News services have almost ceased to report the news from Russia, they only talk about Ukraine, as they now talk about Syria. Just Kremlin believed that the West will remain silent, as in the case with Chechnya and Georgia. But this did not happen. And this was the main mistake.
Russia is an imperialist state, like the USA, England or Turkey. But at the moment Russian imperialism is not associated with business interests and not with any complex geopolitical calculations. It has a single purpose - to preserve the popularity of the regime inside the country.
This policy is typical for the Russian Empire. So in 1904-1905 leadership of the tsarist Empire dreamed of a "small victorious war" with Japan wanting to increase patriotism and stop the revolution. It was not always so. But at the moment Russian imperialism is not based on any complex geopolitical interests or business interests, is nothing more than a PR-project (and this recognition is very unpleasant to many Western leftists).
There is one problem : Russian imperialism is weak.
Russian GDP is only about 1% of global GDP. Russian state is totally dependent on Western technology and Finance, and it has a very weak infrastructure. 50% of the income of the Russian budget comes from oil and gas exports. In the situation when energy prices falling Russian budget collapses. The corrupt bureaucracy of this neo-feudal or rather the neo-absolutist regime controls 70% of Finance of the country and surrounded the business and working class are not only with high taxes but also with informal seizures, racketeering. As one of the representatives of the bureaucracy said, "we try to tilt the 600 largest businessmen". The Word "tilt" on criminal language means both the sexual humiliation and / or cash withdrawal. According to the estimates of Russian economists from 40 to 60% of the state money is stolen regularly.
Such a system may not be effective in confrontation with more powerful imperialisme and doomed to defeat. And the consequences of defeat in the imperialist conflict can be terrible.
http://libcom.org/forums/theo
http://libcom.org/forums/theory/noam-chomsky-13012016
It would perhaps be
It would perhaps be misleading to state that Russian imperialism is for the sake of the regime, as if this stood apart from business interests or was not merely a possibly temporary shill for them. To have these business interests just stand in line in favour of this state, and put their backing behind it, would be to essentially assume that they were somehow being subordinated to it or that it was not a capitalist context, which is not the case.
Nonetheless, it is correct to stress that the Russian state is treated as if it were Stalin's, when in reality it was merely a Western shill coming after the decline of the Soviet Union. As such, its aims and that of the West were in all likelihood not that distinct. What was strange, however, was how quick the West was to throw accusations at Russia - war for oil, obvious attempts at exerting influence, etc. - which it had been obviously subject to for decades, this becoming something of a political consensus back then despite their being little precedent for this. If Russia acted without the support of business interests, they acted with no hope of any force that may give them victory, or hoped for a spur which would be completely separated from this. The recent positing of Russia as dynamic and acting belligerently independently of the West is also misleading, and such action is, however, as you suggest likely a PR exercise with little commitment or gains on their side, or perhaps worse for them.
That they invade countries despite Western disapproval was thus necessary to allow them to act while still claiming separation from Western influence, or to be separate, and hence to temporarily quiet the regret for the Soviet Union and power - and realistically, is a person who's fired or unemployed going to be impressed with a Russian businessman just because they're employed or had financial 'power,' when this Russia was previously far more powerful, and did not favour them?
Because of Russian history, then, there was nothing holding these relations together. However, if they were to attack something with Western support, which they did not do and would not have done, then they have the contradiction of having to pretend not to fall in line, and at the same time fall in line, as being hypothetically one force, which not only undermines their state due to this opposition, but also would imply abandoning one of these lines if it were to occur in a serious manner or genuinely. Their unity with the West is of such a pervasive nature that to seriously line up alongside them would imply that they had immediately to become clearly not the Russian state they were claiming to be, and hence to try instead to fall in line with the West and try to contradict dissidents to this form of the state. However, conversely, getting involved in anything like a Cold War again would be not only too much for them to take, but also undermine their foundations and have no real basis to pivot itself on, such that the light dismissal of their actions by Western nations seems like something they may have had to verify in advance and in part a question of agreement between them, and in brief they could do little other than disagree with the West but not get into a serious confrontation, which was indeed most of their actions. In a sense, though, this was more about a 'new Russia' than any particular regime, which would have to be replaceable if necessary, or it would just be the earlier Soviet Union. In addition, disagreements were generally nominal. Nonetheless, a lot of the Russian state could be explained by, due to not being able to break from the Soviet Union, having to avoid advocating most things identified with the West, but otherwise being defined by its status as a Western shill or necessarily tied to the West.
This made its gestures in either direction hollow, and hence its allies were generally decently dealt with by the left communists.
People who thought of Russian governments as something necessarily tied to Russia might wish to consider that Russians were living in the shadow of the Soviet Union, and US Presidents, etc., merely living in the shadow of US Presidents, who are not generally considered significant or different. That this shadow seemingly grew more rather than less prominent with time might be considered a question of instability elsewhere preventing any coherent government from building upon it, and hence was always promising.