Well, Russia has been repeatedly invaded. Overrun by the Mongols. The French, the Germans, the British, the Germans again. And threatened with nuclear attack by the US, after Japan surrendered. So they're paranoid, perhaps understandably.
About every nation in Europe has been repeatedly invaded, this is hardly unique with Russia. At least they didn't lose their statehood for a couple centuries like Poland or got a third of population exterminated like Belarus or got starved off into cannibalism like much of Ukraine.
rijrjrgyg says: "Russia lost 20 million people in WWII."
While rudely stated, The factual content of rijrjrgyg's post is an undeniable outrage of history "Losing statehood" would, in comparison, be a walk in the park.
Poland, on top of all the statehood problems, also lost 1/5 of it's population to WWII (6 million), which is a substantially larger share of the prewar population than the ~26.5 million Soviet losses were for the Soviet Union, and (again compared to population) Russia wasn't even the worst off of the Soviet Republics in thar.
So, no, Russia's WWII losses don't make Poland's problems a "walk in the park".
My sincerest apologies for that unthinking statement - losing statehood is always much, much more than simply the words 'losing statehood' - it almost inevitably includes war, strife and famine. And certainly every one of Poland's six million or more lost souls, each of those dislocated, wounded and in all ways harmed by war, was a loss to someone's mother, brothers, father, sisters and friends. Were we able to find these lost souls and somehow bring them back we would certainly do so. But words and acts fail: we are but human, not gods, and so Poland's loss, as well as the losses of all involved, will always weigh upon us heavily. What was lost was incalculable and irreplaceable. Who knows what we could have been had only it not happened?
Russians love to bathe in their victimhood and equal their participation in WW2 to Soviet, but worth reminding Belarus and Ukraine were parts of Soviet Union as well and suffered disproportionately more losses than Russia.
And they also like to forget that their (and not just theirs) losses in WWII were exacerbated by the fact that they were initially co-aggressors with the Nazis, not opponents of them.
in 2017 this matters for absolutely nothing. Germany and France have been at war for decades, does that mean if both their leaders were paranoid and warmongering they'd be justified? No, it's a different world.
As I noted in another thread, Putin grew up in the immediate aftermath of WWII. And he's from Leningrad. And then there's the Cold War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. So yes, he has issues about all that, and so do many other Russians, and that's why he's so popular.