Russian leaders have from time immemorial divided foreign and security policy into two areas: far off and uninteresting posts like the United Nations or Argentina - and the countries surrounding it, the interesting part - the ‘near abroad’. Of course a country with such a long frontier could be nervous, and the way Russia - and the penultimate Soviet Union - assuaged its fears was to expand.

According to Harvard’s Richard Pipes, it expanded from mid-seventeenth to mid-twentieth century at a rate that equaled the annual acquisition of land equal roughly to that of today’s Netherlands.

In 1980 just after Ronald Reagan’s election, a think tank in Philadelphia held a semi-official meeting with Moscow’s foreign policy elite, starting with Yuri Arbatov, the head of the USA Institute.