The conventional wisdom is that Russia is too nuclear and too big to fail. But it’s also too big to secure — and that means Moscow has pursued a somewhat counterintuitive foreign policy in the surrounding regions.
To protect its borders, Russia splinters and shatters its borderlands, from Donbas in Europe to Damascus in Asia. Russia’s vast Eurasian borderlands have become the Kremlin’s buffer zones — a nearly uninterrupted expanse of armed conflict and war.
