Maybe Yeltsin cared but was just an incompetent drunk, but Putin has done more for the welfare of the Russian people than Yeltsin except possibly for the latter stepping on a tank in 1991 (forgetting for a minute than he later sent tanks to bomb the Parliament). And Gorbachev also did care but was in an impossible situation. And Khrushev cared enough to roll back Stalinism... And then there's Peter the Great.
Whether it is for misplaced reasons (I say panslavism, you say imperialism) or not, Russia does care about Belarus and Ukraine, and also about the millions of ethnic Russians in the former Soviet republics.
Now, you may not like their style but, come on! Most economists teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless. -- James K. Galbraith
I am as appalled as the next person by some of the things that have been going on in Russia under Putin re: human and political rights, press freedom, and the way terrorism and separatism have been handled, etc, but analysis of Russia which starts from the premise that Putin is the devil gets us nowhere. Most economists teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless. -- James K. Galbraith
With a declining Russian population of course the people as well as the territory of Ukraine are attractive to Putin, but only as yet more resources to be exploited, I fear.
