This is certainly the prevailing view amongst the media classes, but I am not sure that it is necessarily the best way of describing recent history.
The collapse of the USSR did leave a lot of Russian and pro-Russian people living in what were now independent states. In many cases (including Ukraine pre-2014) there were enough of them to ensure that the new country was friendly to Moscow, and where these populations weren't present geography (lack of access to elsewhere / Russia's size) meant that being friendly to Moscow was eminently sensible economically, strategically and politically. In that sense any Russian leadership, democratic or autocratic, would enjoy a natural sphere of influence and would react when it was threatened.
Where the risk for democracy is (including from Putin) is not that we are not willing to arm another country or even fight for it (lets face it we have done that repeatedly since the end of the first Cold War) the risk is that we are doing nothing to fix the problems in our societies - inequality, political corruption, governmental incompetence, waste - that are the weak points that the autocrats will go for. Does anyone think people in the developing world look at the likes of Trump, MTG, Johnson and the rest and think they are examples to follow? Are there any positive examples at the top level of Western politics at the moment?
www.bbc.co.uk
