Copernicus
Industrial Grade Linguist
Actually, it's a perfect lesson for russophiles, because it reinforces Russian propaganda that the problem is everybody else always picking on Russians, who are only interested in defending themselves. This paranoid view ignores the reality that Russia has neighbors with equally legitimate fears about their borders, especially the ones next to Russia's border. Renfrew makes the laughable claim that Russia's posture has always been "defensive" and intended to prevent invasions from outside parties. Of course, Russian borders have not remained in the same place over the centuries. They grew from a very small region to become the largest single country in landmass in the entire world. That's pretty impressive for a country that only ever just wanted to defend its own borders. Stalin even shifted the national territories of countries like Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus westward in order to make "Lebensraum" for ethnic Russians--the inverse of Hitler's desire to push ethnic Germans into ethnic Slavic territories.
So Renfrew correctly pointed out that a great many Russians have this fear built in that they are surrounded by enemies who threaten their national security. He just didn't talk about the same fear that exists in all of those countries that were either forcibly incorporated into Russia's growing borders or occupied and turned into puppet states of Russia. The man is literally a self-confessed Russophile who filters his politics through that perspective. But Russians are not the only people who have this fear of invasion. Ukraine and Belarus were just unlucky not to be allowed into NATO, whose only purpose for existence is to contain Russian expansionism. Eastern Europe has been a battleground for such conflicts for centuries. Russian fear and paranoia are nothing unique or special that is "built into" the Russian character. It is an attitude that they deliberately immerse themselves in and stew in it. Russia can talk itself out of what it talked itself into.
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