Geopolitics isn't destiny, but a similar sort of game was played in Soviet times for the same sorts of reasons. Tsarist Russia and the USSR were radically different regimes, but they held in common the same geography, and therefore the same geopolitical imperatives. Russia is easy to defend from the Pacific due to thousands of miles of virtually nothing that the enemy's supply lines would have to stretch across, from the north by the barren Arctic clogged with icebergs, shorn of useful ports, and possessing few viable ways inland to the south from the coast, any of which can serve as natural chokepoints for the Russian defender. The Caucasus isn't a good direction of invasion either; so long as Russia or its allies control land up to the northern ridge of the range, and they do, it's as iron a gate to invasion as any Alexander could ever build.
Really, the only directions a successful invasion of Russia in the modern era could come from are from eastern Europe, or central Asia. The Russian heartland has little in the way of natural barriers and is best defended with the largest buffer possible. This is always why Russian governments, regardless of regime, always strive to move their sphere of influence west towards the Carpathian Mountains and south towards the Iranian Plateau and the Pamirs. Everything Russiaward from those points is flat, indefensible land whose chief strategic value is that it can be traded to the enemy for time.
When Gorbachev's hyperutopian ass traded the Red Navy to Pepsico for history's most ill-advised slice of Pizza Hut, when he named Soviet foreign policy after an American lounge singer and let the Soviet satellite states of eastern Europe fall to capitalist revanchism, he was operating out of an assumption that the Americans would honor their gentleman's agreement with him that NATO wouldn't advance eastwards. May the Russian people never forgive him his abject stupidity.
So with that backstory out of the way, let's focus on Francis Fukuyama being wrong, history not ending, and these same geopolitical tensions revving up again. I'm going to explain them, and also explain how they're all connected, because it's useless to just see "oh this happened, oh that happened, oh this other thing over here happened" without looking at the bigger picture, the wider chess game being played between the two sides.
NATO broke that gentleman's agreement, and now everything west of Russia but Belarus is firmly in the imperialist camp.
