Personally I think that those urges have once again been properly purged, with the understanding that Russia will never be truly accepted (an understanding many other countries have realized due to its example as well), and that Russia will never be safe, never be “off the menu,” until a more equitable, multipolar world exists, and until the imperialists carving people up on the menu are neutered and neutralized.

And even when they had those urges- for all that their attempt at joining NATO was disgusting- I can’t claim it wasn’t understandable, from the perspective of one of the reasons the nomenklatura traitors dissolved the union to begin with. The Russian libs and naive idealists who had gained power thought they could become a “normal country” (for all good that did them, and for all the nonsense that notion is), that they could end the iron curtain (which was just as much if not more a western invention than a soviet one), that they could finally have peace rather than be bled out financially or otherwise through constant cold war- and instead, all they got was a gun to their head and an increasingly menacing and unhinged NATO. I see their attempts at requesting to join NATO in that regard also as a last naive ploy for peace- because they (the Russian ruling elites and a significant portion of the country) didn’t understand, not then, the nature of imperialism.

Nowadays, Russia has re-learnt- over the past decade and particularly the past few years- a painful lesson. If they had never forgotten it, the Soviet Union would never have dissolved- the decades of shock therapy and other horrors would never have happened. But sadly it’s something that even much of the world- that many communities, and even more individuals, constantly forget. It’s a shame we humans have short lives and perhaps shorter memories in general.