Putin’s suspicion of NATO can be boiled down to one simple explanation: geography. At the height of the Cold War and the Soviet Union’s power, the USSR and its allied Warsaw Pact countries encompassed half of Europe and almost the entirety of Central Asia. But after the demise of the USSR in 1989, lands once within Moscow’s orbit quickly peeled away to join NATO. Today, only Belarus remains firmly within Moscow’s influence, and even that partnership has teetered recently. For Putin, the peeling away of countries from Russia towards NATO comes as both an existential threat …read more
Source: Business Insider
