I laid out my model for Russia in “The Next 100 Years,” which I wrote in 2007 and was published in January 2009. I argued that Russia would have to become more aggressive in its efforts to contain Western incursions into the buffer spaces of the former Soviet Union. The first step of that process was the Russo-Georgian War of 2008, a relatively mild event. The overthrow of the pro-Russia government in Ukraine a few years later, and its replacement by a pro-West regime, created a fundamental shift in Moscow that is being played out now in Belarus, the South Caucasus, Moldova and of course Ukraine itself. In my analysis then and now, Russia could not accept the geographic and political realities that the fall of the Soviet Union created and would become increasingly aggressive within the former Soviet Union and in a more limited sense globally, as in Syria.
