[pmoriarty]

"we gave them the middle finger and created a jaded enemy that wants to be the ussr again because we treated them as the ussr"

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the US gave Russia a tremendous amount of money in hopes it would aid its transition to a modern democracy... much of that money just disappeared and the former Soviet elites stole or bought up much of what used to belong to the state in the newly privatized economy. Meanwhile the KGB and organized crime in Russia joined forces and turned the country in to a corrupt dictatorship, which had a chip on its shoulder against the West and looked backwards to the glory days of the empire of the Soviet Union.

While all this was going on, the US considered the Cold War over and actually changed its military strategy to focus on fighting many small urban conflicts and terrorists rather than facing the USSR in a world war. It also scaled down its nuclear capabilities tremendously.

The US wouldn't have done any of these things had it wanted to "give Russia the middle finger".

[orbital-decay]

This post oversimplifies several things, or gets them wrong. Most money were from the IMF, France and Germany, not the US, and it was in loans, it wasn't just aid. Clinton was a "personal friend" of Yeltsin, the same "elite" who stole tremendous amount of foreign money, refused to limit his power to create checks and balances, botched the privatisation and generally turned Russia into oligarchy with controlled media. He was also a person who led Putin to power. This "friendship" ended up in their collusion in 1996 elections to save Boris (already massively hated by then, due to the Chechen war and privatisation) against the communist opponent. Part of that is known as Xerox affair and is surprisingly well documented in English. Similar to Russia's involvement in the US elections 2 decades later, the US involvement didn't help Yeltsin much in 1996 actually (he did everything himself), but it made the population disillusioned towards the US, created a fertile ground for the national myth, and more importantly the collusion pushed aside Nemtsov, then the most popular politician with no ties to USSR. (does the name ring a bell? It should)

[aaomidi]

Then the US was fucking stupid if they thought the money wasn’t going to get gobbled up.

You can’t just $$$ to an unstable country and expect it to work.