Your comment is typical product of Russophobia maintained by the imperialistic Nazi West. The Central European Vatican terrorist Poland-Lithuania occupied Russian territories for 500 years including and Moscow in 1612. Then West Europe send Napoleon in 1812 to try once again and then Hitler in 1941. Now is turn for NATO with all Central European small garbage nations who joined it.

This is not about ideology, it is about resources.
The question is who is going to control the enormous territory of Russia and its resources — an independent Russian elite, or a puppet elite installed and controlled by the West.
The prize is huge.
All the ideology talk and the babble about democracy, human rights, and other stuff of the sort is just a smokescreen. In reality, the USA is just as much a capitalist oligarchy that pays zero attention to human rights as Russia is, it’s just that the Russians are less hypocritical about it.

I don’t think so. I think the Orthodox Church (which others have noted Putin is using [and vice versa] in an exercise of soft power – http://bit.ly/2fJWLOk) is a nationalistic force, a negative thing. Russian doesn’t need nationalism. Or, if you like, It needs to not imitate the nationalistic forces such as you see in places like Ukraine, where nationalism means promoting racial purity and a hatred of the other. This is how the macho global 1% is playing it, and the rise of fascism (and nationalism) globally may indeed divide the peoples of the world and create an instability and fear within each fascist country that ruling classes can exploit, but it’s dangerous and I can see it getting out of control. Professor Kovacevic may not see harm in Putin’s use of the Orthodox Church to wield soft power, but I personally have zero use for Churches or any religious organizations who fear man more than God and who act as though God’s Kingdom will be something that imperfect humans create. It isn’t for nothing that the Christian Bible refers to global false religion (all denominations) as a harlot. This isn’t just a harlot. She’s married (in a relationship with God, which requires her to be loyal and obedient to him) and her husband, God, doesn’t approve of her acts of fornication with the godless, secular ‘Kings’ of the earth, who he has warned us, will one day, in a short period of time, turn on this harlot, Babylon The Great, and destroy her.

US ruling class members are not normal humans. They are self-modified. Where you had human impulses and sanity, you now have a love of violence and inequality. Hence neoliberalism, which is both violence (of a sort) and inequality (shredded safety nets and austerity that makes safety nets more needed than ever) and neoconservitism (violence and deceit). It was self-modified people who envisioned a world divided into regions where the powerful leaders in some regions decided that they had to conquer other regions, both powerful and weak. And powerful world leaders especially targetted other powerful leaders who they thought could potentially gain enough power to rule the world. Russian, Chinese and American ruling classes are not different in character. No doubt, Russian and Chinese leaders would like to rule the world the way the US does at present. They are different in degrees of power, but not in character. And by now, The American ruling class has a much worse record than the other two giants. (It has more power, more freedom – which being lawless has a lot do with – and therefore commits more crimes. Russia has made overtures to the US to integrate fully into the global economic system, and the military alliance, namely NATO, that underpins it, repeatedly. The US said “No thanks.” Find ‘that’ history in major media.)
Each ruling class has no doubt committed different kinds of atrocities. The Chinese ruling class has snuffed out freedom of expression in China to an extraordinary degree. It has made it’s citizens into idiots. Whereas, as Chomsky (who’s attacked by Left and Right for obvious reasons) has noted, Despite it’s crimes, which continue, the US is a remarkably freer society than others. For which reason Americans have a responsibility to pressure their leaders to do the right thing. There’s much to say about that, of course. Chomsky does point out that precisely because of that freedom, the US ruling class depends more on it’s sophisticated propaganda system than ruling classes like China’s does. In China, They don’t have to bother with feeding you mush on tv and in other ways, although they no doubt do (I don’t know). They just demand obedience, which, if it isn’t forthcoming, may see you working for free someplace that is a combination factory and jail.
With these godless ruling classes, it’s about domination. There’s no doubt about that in the case of the United States. The US wants to (and does) dominate the world and it dresses that up often, calling it ‘leadership’ and explaining it’s role as ‘indispensable’. It would have the unwary believe that it is the world’s foremost champion of democracy. (That is why the Christian Bible refers to the American component of the wild beast as a “false prophet.”) That stands in for a ‘vision’ once you’ve self-modified. The great game (which was once only Great Britain vs the Soviet Union but has now become the US and it’s allies against China and, mainly, Russia) comes from minds of individuals in power who have self-modified and is simply a way for the ruling classes and weapons makers to organize their violence. The imperialism and warmaking would go down whether there was a vision like Halford Mackinder’s (father of geopolitics) or not. And if it wasn’t the US ruling class dominating and destroying, then it would be some other godless, dark-minded ruling class.

Russians didn’t take over. The Bolsheviks took over. The destroyed a key part of Russian culture binding Russians together, namely the Orthodox Church. The descendents of the Bolsheviks are running similar schemes to destroy the fabric of other western countries even today.

If I remember correctly the ‘stomping of Chechnya’ was Russia stopping the Empire from seizing control of an oil / gas transportation region using the usual Al Qaeda proxy force.