RUSSIA IN CONTEMPORARY POLITICS - AN AGGRESSOR POWER

Russia, over the last millennium, has been guided by its imperial ambitions, enslaving primarily frontier countries and exporting its doctrine of aggression to countries on other continents. African countries, under the guise of aiding Russia's national liberation movement, have received death and devastation from towns and villages. Recent events in the Middle East in Syria have seen massacres of civilians and destruction of cities. A striking example is Aleppo, where tens of thousands of people were killed in carpet bombing and the city itself was completely destroyed. Since the times of the Kiev principalities, one can trace the horrific events of the internecine war in the devastation of Kiev and the killing of civilians. For centuries, Peter the Great's catchphrase: "To build a window to Europe" plunged Russia into an economic crisis, killing hundreds of thousands of people. For more than 800 years, Russia, burdened by imperial ambitions, steadily pursued an aggressive policy, preaching to its citizens its superiority over other nations, instilling a great power chauvinism in their souls. This can be traced throughout Russian history: the Finnish war, the war in North Ossetia, Abkhazia, Georgia, Chechnya, Transnistria and Ukraine. The KGB, and later the FSB of Russia, carried out mass exterminations of national movement leaders undesirable to the Kremlin; so-called mop-ups were carried out by Russian agents to eliminate intelligence officers who refused to carry out criminal orders against humanity. Russian Security Service sniper units used targeted fire to kill Maidan leaders in Kiev.