NEWSLINK: “What Does Vladimir Putin Want? [interview with Alexander Vershbow]” – New York Magazine

“… Q: Assuming all the intelligence agencies are right that Russia meddled in the election, why do you think they would do so? It reflects a broader kind of hostility on the Russians’ part towards the West. It was brewing for some time, and I think it burst into full flower after Putin came back into the presidency in 2012. He became convinced that the Western strategy was a regime change vis-à-vis Russia. That’s his distorted version of history. He believes that even Gorbachev may have been an unwitting dupe of the West, but he certainly sees Yeltsin, and the whole experience of Russia in the ’90s, as a period in which the West took advantage of Russia and tried to marginalize it as a global power. He and his fellow KGB veterans never viewed Gorbachev and Yeltsin as legitimate, and in a sense are restoring the status quo ante – but without the Marxist-Leninist ideology. It’s the same kind of fervent Russian nationalism and the same defensive view of the relationship with the West – defensive and zero-sum. …”