Isn't the Russian invasion of Ukraine an attempt to repeat its successful dismemberment and occupation of Georgia in 2008?

According to Masha Gessen, Putin takes a longer view than that:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-masha-gessen.html

”But Putin appears to be placing himself on a continuum of Russian history that he sees as a series of great leaders beginning with Ivan the Terrible. Ivan the Terrible was not an emperor that Russians particularly revered ever before Vladimir Putin’s reign. But the first monument to Ivan the Terrible went up, I guess, six or seven years ago in Russia. So Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Joseph Stalin, and Vladimir Putin. It’s a huge span. It’s a series of great, brutal, expansionist dictators.”

The interview covers a lot of ground and is worth a read if you want a deeply analytical view that balances study with close-up observation. I thought the part about not being able to know what the people think because the people can’t really think was especially striking. Host Ezra Klein says:

”And you (Gessen) talk about how the tools of self-understanding were withheld, everything from sociology to Freudian psychoanalysis. All of the different sciences that we use to create different lenses on our own society — to say nothing of the empirical information that feeds into them — not Freudian analysis, but others — were withheld.”