This iron curtain didn’t start descending in February of this year, though, and it wasn’t the West that initiated it:

An iron curtain between Russia and the West is essentially already here, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said, describing the political and economic wall that has formed following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“As far as an iron curtain is concerned, essentially it is already descending,” Lavrov said after talks with Belarus’s foreign minister, according to a translation by AFP.

He added that the EU made no effort to understand Russia’s interests, saying it’s “interested in what has been decided in Brussels. And what has been decided in Washington has been decided in Brussels.”

Lavrov’s specific complaint here is the sanctions that got imposed on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine as well as the interruptions in diplomatic talks. The Russians are largely responsible for the latter, however, as they cut off deconfliction communications with the US and NATO for weeks after invading Ukraine. It took nearly three months for Sergey Shoigu to answer Lloyd Austin’s calls, and it’s not clear whether the Russians have continued those conversations since that one call in mid-May.

As for the sanctions, those came as a direct result of the second invasion of Ukraine. Let’s not forget that Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 by seizing the strategic Crimean peninsula and annexing it to Russia, while at the same time supplying military support to ethnic-Russian proxy militias in the Donbas. The West hit Russia with some mild sanctions over that invasion, which was at least more than they did when Putin invaded Georgia in 2008. In that invasion, Putin carved off South Ossetia and Abkhazia as satellites to Moscow.

Putin and Lavrov have wanted to blame all of this on NATO expansion attempts in 2007, but that’s nothing more than a diversion — although a relatively successful diversion in certain diplomatic circles. (Ambassador Francis Rooney has a few things to say about the Vatican in that regard in my latest podcast.) First off, NATO never did act on its proposed initiatives with Georgia and Ukraine, but even if it had, it would have been a voluntary association with sovereign independent nations. Second, it’s clearly nothing more than a handy excuse for Putin’s ambitions to reconquer the territories Russia lost in the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This is the point missed by the entire series of American presidents during Putin’s reign, and especially by the fools in Europe who tied their economies to Moscow during the same period. Putin has always been an imperialist, one with no scruples about using military conquest to seize territory. He also has no scruples when it comes to indiscriminate targeting, as he proved in Chechnya, a ten-year conflict that the world largely ignored as an internal matter. The same imperialism was on display in the Caucasus all along and led to the invasion of Georgia near the end of the Chechnyan conflict, a move that finally led George W. Bush to belatedly realize Putin’s true nature.

And then Hillary Clinton laughed it off with a reset button.

Let’s also not forget the years of assassinations of Putin dissenters by Russian intelligence in Western countries, or of assassinations of dissenters and journalists inside Russia as well.  This is a thug regime, and we knew that long before we saw the indiscriminate commission of war crimes in Ukraine. Those continue right up to today, in fact:

Russian missiles struck residential areas near the key port city of Odesa in southern Ukraine early Friday, killing at least 19 people, Ukrainian authorities said.

Russian bombers fired a trio of X-22 missiles that hit a nine-story apartment building and two recreational areas in the small coastal town of Serhiivka, located about 31 miles southwest of Odesa, according to a statement from the Security Service of Ukraine, which noted that rescue operations were underway.

Two children were among the 19 confirmed deaths. Another 38 people, including six children and a pregnant woman, were hospitalized with injuries. Most of the victims were in the apartment building, where the entire entrance was “completely destroyed,” authorities said.

That follows a deadly missile strike on a shopping mall in Kremenchuk two days earlier. Volodymyr Zelensky accurately called a terrorist attack and wants an even thicker Iron Curtain to result from it:

The targeted shopping mall in Kremenchuk, Ukraine, was filled with thousands of people before air alarms warned them of the missiles. Many were able to get out, but several civilians remained inside the building, Zelensky said during a virtual address late Monday evening, according to the Hill.

“Only totally insane terrorists, who should have no place on Earth, can strike missiles at such an object,” Zelensky said. “And this is not an off-target missile strike. This is a calculated Russian strike — exactly at this shopping mall.”

Zelensky urged the United States to recognize Russia “as a state that sponsors terrorism,” arguing everyone must know that working with Russia, including buying or transporting Russian oil and maintaining contacts with Russian banks, “means giving money to terrorists.”

“The Russian state has become the largest terrorist organization in the world,” he said. “And this is a fact. And this must be a legal fact.”

Now Lavrov wants to whine about this new Iron Curtain as if it’s descending out of nowhere. In fact, it’s descending now for the same reason it did in the 1940s — Russian imperialism and barbarism. The Soviet flavor of the centuries-old Russian imperial ambitions led Stalin to seize most of eastern Europe, and in a not-dissimilar manner in which Putin’s trying to start it all over again in Ukraine. The people behind it then were brutally suppressed by Stalin and his successors, and Putin wants to do the same to as many of the same peoples as he can put under his thumb by military conquest.

That’s Russia’s interest under Putin and Lavrov. Lavrov’s whining not because we don’t understand that, but because we’ve finally begun to grasp it.