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What we call Russia likes to trace its roots to the 800s, but that story begins in Kyiv, not Moscow. Moscow only became a power in the 1300s, and the Russia we know today has only been an independent state since 1991. In all that time, it has managed roughly eight years of what you could call a normal relationship with Europe, a brief window after the Wall came down. Today it has chosen a different road once again. While Europe was living through the Renaissance, humanism and the slow birth of democracy, Russia spent nearly 300 years under the Mongols, and that is where its political culture was forged. The Khan ruled by terror and tribute, and the princes of Moscow rose to power by becoming his tax collectors, squeezing their own people and skimming off the top. Power meant plunder, and the only question was who got to do the plundering. Land, property and life itself belonged to the ruler, not to the people, so no one ever learned that rights, contracts or human dignity were things worth defending. What you learned instead was to grovel before anyone above you and crush anyone below you, to lie to the authorities because the truth got you killed, and to steal because everything would be stolen from you anyway. When the Mongols finally left, Moscow simply kept the system and called it the Tsardom. Theft, corruption and contempt for human life were never bugs in Russia. They were the operating system. Today, Ukraine has given them their answer.