Even after the fall of the Soviet Empire, some in Russia – like President Vladimir Putin – still cling to the old imperialist ambitions. Now Mother Russia has its eyes on the Ukraine. A pro-Russian prime minister has just claimed election victory, but Ukraine’s opposition has been holding mass demonstrations to protest the outcome. Both sides are now warning of a civil war. It will interesting – nerve racking – to see how Putin will react to the upheaval in the Ukraine. He’s already lost many of the old Soviet colonies (e.g., Bulgaria, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania). Will Putin allow Russia to find its place as a middle-weight power, or will he insist on clinging to the delusion that Russia is still a world player?

On the political front, many observers felt that the Russian presidential elections held earlier this year “failed to meet democratic standards.” Indeed, this is par-for-the-course for President Vladimir Putin, who spent 17 years working for the dreaded KGB, one of the largest and most brutal “security services” in world history. Vladimir has surrounded himself with other former KGB goons, so in the Kremlin nowadays, “influence stems from the former Soviet organs of repression.”

The former Russian/Soviet-occupied Eastern European countries all have long memories of what it was like to live under totalitarian, communist rule, including the Ukraine. For example, during Russian occupation of the Baltic, thousands of Lithuanians were murdered, and at least 250,000 were deported to Siberia. Most never made it home from the cold, barren gulags (Russian "re-education camps"). Remember the Katyn Forest Massacre, where mostly Russian Soviet troops executed between 4,000 and 10,000 Polish soldiers? Millions of Ukrainians were killed by Soviet forces in 1932-33. These are just a few examples of atrocities under Soviet rule.

Why do I emphasize Russian complicity in Soviet atrocities? Simple: Some have tried to paint the Soviet Union as some kind of distinctly “communist” phenomena. That’s like saying Germans had nothing to do with the Nazi Party during WWII. Sorry to disappoint the historical revisionists, but let’s give credit where credit is due. According to the U.S. Library of Congress:

The ethnic composition of the [Soviet communist] party reflected further disproportions between the party and the population as a whole (see table 26, Appendix A). In 1922 the share of Russian members in the party exceeded their proportion of the population by 19 percent. Since that time, the gap between Russians and other nationalities has narrowed. In 1979 Russians constituted 52 percent of the Soviet population; however, they constituted 60 percent of the party in 1981. Moreover, the percentage of Russians in the party apparatus was probably even greater than their percentage in the party as a whole.

Putin and his current goon-squad were part of the Soviet apparatus of murder and corruption. Can they change their spots? If they can, they are not showing much evidence of it. In June of this year, a Russian IL-18 military aircraft violated Estonian airspace, and “NATO officials did not rule out that the IL-18 was on a spying mission.”

How Putin reacts to the current tensions in Ukraine will tell us volumes about how well Russia is willing to play by the rules. According to the BBC,

For Russia, and particularly for President Putin, Ukraine should be in its sphere of influence. Ukraine after all was where the Russia state itself began in the ninth century and the idea that Ukraine should float off to join the EU and maybe even Nato is not a welcome one.

I’ve got a message for Putin and the rest of Russia’s neo-imperialists: Your sphere of influence is rapidly diminishing. Bulgaria, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic are now official NATO members. When that Russian IL-18 violated Estonian airspace, 2 NATO F-16’s based in Lithuania were scrambled to intercept it. Today, “US Secretary of State Colin Powell said Washington ‘cannot accept’ the [Ukrainian] election result as legitimate."

Dear Russia: Mind your manners or you’ll be dealing with the U.S., NATO, and EU.