In their latest piece for Newsweek, Owen Matthews and Anna Nemtsova do an excellent job explaining all the reasons why Russia has tumbled toward authoritarianism and confrontational foreign policy:  it serves the unending quest for respect.  By spending most of the article attempting to place the decisions of the Russian leadership in a rational context, as well as provide reasoning for why the citizens largely support and even celebrate the regime, Matthews and Nemtsova help to bridge the yawning gap of misunderstanding between the West and the complicated Russian mindset.  My only complaint might be that we should be careful not to view what we would call “Russia’s self esteem paradox” as the sole determinant of what has happened to the country over the past decade, as we should remember that corruption has proliferated and public office has become the fastest way to become a state corporate millionaire … in other words, there also exists a parallel defense of the status quo which is much more about respect for one’s checking account than global respect for Russia’s influence.

Two other thoughts – how should illogical partners such as Venezuela and Sudan feel about being instrumentalized as simple bargaining chips that could be dropped at any moment as the result of a new, miniature Molotov-Ribbentrope-type agreement?  Secondly, why is it always the responsibility of the West to generate these kinds of excuses for Moscow?  At any rate, from an article worth your time over at Newsweek:

That idea of a “sphere of influence”–or what Medvedev, a little more tactfully, calls a “zone of special interests”–is really a budget version of the old empire. The Kremlin seems to have bought its own rhetoric and to have convinced itself that Russia remains a great power–and deserves to be treated as such. “The world’s problems cannot be solved without consulting Russia,” says Gorbachev. But like it or not, he’s wrong. Russia still has nukes and enormous energy reserves. Yet it has little ability to project military power beyond its borders, and the Kremlin’s saber rattling has pushed even erstwhile allies like Belarus and Ukraine into the arms of the West. In economic terms, Russia’s GDP has recently grown close to Italy’s in terms of size, thanks to high energy prices. But shorn of natural resources, the rest of its economy remains mired in inefficiency and corruption.