[hedora]

Westerners are usually referring to the Russian leadership. There's a straight line of corruption from the Soviets to Putin.

Also, we're bad at geography, and "former soviet state" is easy / lazy.

Finally, I know lots of Ukrainians that grew up in Russia and vice versa, and can't really keep all the permutations straight. (As I can't for my colleagues from any continent.)

[federoccco]

a bit of nitpicking — but the Soviet Union never really had predominantly Russian leadership, which would be disproportionate to the Russian part of the Soviet population. Lenin was from a Russian noble but ethnically diverse family. Stalin was a Georgian and spoke Russian with an incredibly thick accent to the end of his life. Khrushchev and Brezhnev were Ukrainians, and so on.

But I get your point, and now it makes more sense to me.

I see in Putin more of that monarchist strain — chauvinism from the times of Imperial Russia, which indeed was so much focused on that "RRR-Russian" identity, much more "blood and soil" ideology. And add to that Late Soviet state "efficiency".