>>17884307 (OP)
as much as Kremlin propaganda seethes at the corrupted dying satanic homosex Europe, Russian identity at its very core is built around this paradoxical unanswerable question about whether Russia is European or not. this obsession with Europe and how Russia fits into it goes back centuries with people larping about how the seizure of Crimea and its scattered Hellenic ruins unlocked some magical ancestral link to the Greco Roman lineage the rest of Europe autistically fought over, this obsession with Kiev as the spiritual heartland of the Rus because of the Kievan Rus' ties to the Byzantines unlike Muscovy's history of the Mongol yoke and then isolation in the middle of nowhere, and then you have the Orthodox church larping as some inheritor of Rome.
the massive cultural weight of Europe as an idea in the minds of Russians filters into their strategic decision making, the Kremlin is unhappy with their imploding influence in Syria and the Caucuses and Central Asia but Ukriane is just ultimately more important because it is their gateway to Europe. this obsession with Russia as being tied into Europe on some destiny level is so strong that they are pouring their state into the current quagmire in Ukraine despite their domestic industries and banks being increasingly replaced by Chinese ones, a trade off that seems unacceptable if the core issue was just national sovereignty. then again it is a fucking pathetic joke to pretend Ukraine was ever a threat to Russia, as pathetic as claiming the war is about NATO when Russian actions brought Finland and Sweden into NATO, has reinvigorated the alliance, and is seeing Turkey replacing Russia as the security partner of choice in the Caucuses. that said Duma members have been regularly threatening Kazakhstan for years now for what its worth.
