The disintegration of the Soviet Union was not viewed as a defeat by the Russian people, but the west treats Russia as a defeated nation all the same.

President Vladimir Putin has been trying to bring together most of the countries of the former Soviet Union in an economic alliance. This would have strengthened the region’s economic competitiveness and helped ward off the kind of instability that bedevilled the Weimar Republic after the dissolution of the German Empire. However, the west has done more or less everything it could to prevent this legitimate rapprochement.

The Ukrainian elite has been unable to steer its country towards a more prosperous future. In 1990 Ukraine’s gross domestic product per capita was similar to that of Belarus; today, it is half. Each change of government has brought a worse cadre of incompetents and thieves into Kiev’s corridors of power.