Welcome, if you must, to the Russian Weimar
The sooner the war ends without shrill demands for regime change in Moscow, the safer the world will be from a replay of European history.
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HISTORICAL analogies are imperfect at best and misleading at worst, but they do convey at the least a rough sense of patterns that survive over time. So it is in the case of Russia's war with Ukraine. The invasion suggests continuities derived from the recent past.
In an essay published in The Washington Quarterly shortly before Dec 25, 1991, when the Soviet Union's hammer-and-sickle flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time, the American strategist Andrew C Goldberg outlined 3 illustrative scenarios of the post-Soviet future.
The first scenario was that of the "Soviet Weimar". That was a reference to Weimar Germany, existing in the 1920s and the 1930s, which had regained a degree of revisionist importance in global affairs after its defeat in World War I. (The Nazi ascendancy that led to the next and definitive German defeat in World War II would come later.)
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