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The best countries for software development outsourcing are India, Ukraine, Poland, China and Estonia. For these five countries, I’ll show the software development outsourcing picture in the format: country ➜ number of developers ➜ rate ➜ IT market growth dynamics ➜ startup environment ➜ state support.INDIANumber of developers: 5.2 millionHourly rate: $15-$25IT market growth dynamics: 280+ Incubators / Accelerators work. Angel investments are growing and active investors increased by 20%.The consumer Internet market in India ranks second in the world with 462 million Internet users, 80% of which are mobile.Startup environment: The number of new technology projects is about 4750.7 million people graduate from colleges annually. 55% of young people prefer to work in startups, says StartupIndia. IBM partners with 100 Indian big data and IoT startups.Global investors such as Alibaba Group, Softbank, Sequoia and Foxconn are investing in the Indian startup ecosystem.Among successful new business projects are: Ola Cabs, AddressHealth, Zomato, Paytm, FreshToHome, reshFreshMenu, Myra, Cure.Fit, InCred, DocTalk, Cars24, etc.State support: There is an initiative called “Startup India,” which promotes the growth of new enterprises and the creation of employment opportunities.Convenient new business projects registration via the mobile application and website. Anyone can fill out a simple form on the site and upload the necessary documents. The creation of foundation to provide funds to startups as venture capital.New business projects are exempt from income tax for 3 years after receiving certification from the Interagency Council (IMB).UKRAINENumber of developers: about 166 000Hourly rate: $25-$50IT market growth dynamics: Ukraine is one of the most promising countries in Eastern Europe. It has become one of Europe's leading and fastest growing destinations for global software development services. Ukraine is one of the 20 largest exporters of software development services in the world. Over 1,000 software development outsourcing companies with 80+ employees work here. In 2017, the export of information technology grew by 20% and reached a record of $ 3.6 billion. In 2025, this figure may increase to 8.4 billion.According to the CEE report for 2019, the country's software development sector in 2018 grew by 19% and continues to progress.According to A.T. Kearney Global Services Location Index, Ukraine ranks 7th among the most attractive software development outsourcing countries in Europe, and 24th among the most attractive software development outsourcing countries in the world.Ukraine ranked 20th among the leading countries in software development outsourcing business worldwide according to Statista 2019.10 Ukrainian software development outsourcing companies were in the TOP-28 global companies according to B2B Ratings & Reviews (B2B Ratings & Reviews).Over 100 R&D centers with 12,400 employees work here.State support: Successful projects: TripMyDream, Petcube, Grammarly, Looksery, Augmented Pixels, Kwambio, Settle, Ring, People.ai | Revenue Intelligence Powered by AI | Revenue Intelligence Powered by AI (People.ai | Revenue Intelligence Powered by AI), MacPaw, etc.The number of current technological startups totals approximately 2,000.Technological investments are supported by business angels, several dozen venture funds, as well as several foreign organizations, including the EBRD, USAID, and the Soros Fund.Several local grant programs are organized by Microsoft and Cisco, work here. From an software development outsourcing service provider, Ukraine is rapidly transforming into an offshore full-cycle software developer.State support: Simplified tax system for the IT industry and software development outsourcing. International double tax treaties with 67 countries.Lack of VAT payment to exporters of software development services for non-residents, due to this, Ukrainian software development outsourcing companies are able offer foreign customers competitive prices.In 2016, Law No. 4496 was adopted, which facilitated the work of foreign clients with Ukrainian freelancers.The state program for free higher education, including technical, allows the country to have the second largest pool of software developers in Central and Eastern Europe. High-quality technical education is provided by 390 universities and colleges. This forms the basis of Ukraine’s IT ecosystem and strengthens Ukraine as a strong player in software development outsourcing.Annually, about 40,000 IT industry specialists graduate from Ukrainian universities. 44.6% of software developers in Ukraine speak English fluently, 37.6% speak intermediate level.For more detailed information on software development outsourcing in Ukraine, read our detailed study.The country is in the UTC +2 time zone, which is also quite convenient for communicating with the software development team while working on software development outsourcing. Thus, Ukraine is 7 hours ahead of the US east coast and 1-2 hours ahead of most European countries.POLANDNumber of developers: 254 000Hourly rate: $50-$100IT market growth dynamics: The country's IT services market in 2018 reached $ 4.62 billion with a growth rate of 5.9%. Local companies use the local market to adjust old products and test new ones.International players contribute to the growth of the software development outsourcing market by placing research and development centers, as well as service centers in Poland, using the high level of qualifications of the local ICT labor market.Startup environment: Poland has a significant ecosystem of startups and VK. There are about 120 seed or venture funds, 70 of which are called "active volcanoes." There are dozens of technology parks, incubators and accelerator programs. The number of working technology projects is approximately 2500 - 3000.Among successful projects: Packhelp, Brainly, CallPage, Booksy, Brand24, Infermedica, tethoMe, AirHelp, etc.State support: The government supports the ecosystem with large financial injections, which provides easily accessible grants.The Foundation for Polish Science provides modest grants to outstanding technology teams. The Foundation Startup Poland plays the public voice role for small businesses in relation to government partners and regulators. Startup Academy trains small business founders.Startup Hub Poland promotes the research and development potential of the country, provides external startup pipelines, selection, as well as assessment of pre-investment risks for venture capitalists and major industry players.CHINANumber of developers: 1,9 million.Hourly rate: $50-$100IT market growth dynamics: According to the PwC report, more and more software development outsourcing companies are being created in China in order to use the country's knowledge base in the field of user interface, full-featured, mobile, corporate and gaming software.Software developers take first and second place at the HackerRank Programming Olympics. This indicates China’s ongoing initiative to develop educational and other supporting infrastructure among its population. Which, in turn, helps to popularize information technology and software development outsourcing companies.Startup environment: To the most promising areas are related artificial intelligence and healthcare. The main problems of new business projects are:capital raising, which 28% of founders consider extremely difficult, reports svb.search for talented people with the right skills. Most of all, employees are needed in the product development / R&D department, technical and commercial departments.According to 2018 data, China is Asia's largest venture capital market.State support: The government has put forward a 15-year development plan for a sustainable IT economy, including software development outsourcing, which strategy is based on science, innovation and technology.Since China became a member of the World Trade Organization in 2001, the country has effectively defended software patents and copyrights. Main incubators and accelerators work together with universities.The startup village Innoway, funded by the government, is surrounded by the best colleges. It has successfully incubated over 2,900 business projects.In Shenzhen and Hong Kong, large incubators and accelerators are teaming up with industry partners such as Huawei and state-funded programs. So, promising projects and potential investors are involved in five technological clusters: green technology, electronics, biotechnology, materials science and precision engineering, ICT.ESTONIANumber of developers: 21 000Hourly rate: $25-$100IT market growth dynamics: Government initiatives to convert all systems to electronic have made Estonia a progressive country:- judicial system- tax system- medical care, etc.The professionalism of the IT services sector in the supply chain, human resources and process automation continues to develop and grow.Estonia is the European champion in the provision of public services on the Internet. It has high rates in digital skills and the use of the Internet by citizens.Startup environment: The startup ecosystem of Estonia is one of the most advanced and internationally integrated in Central and Eastern Europe.Successful local new business projects: Skype, TransferWise, Pipedrive, Click & Grow, Grabcad, Cloutex, Erply, Fortumo, Lingvist, Taxify, Veriff, Jobbatical, Yanu, Scoro, etc. Microsoft, Acronis, SAP, and Parallels open R&D centers here. Here work more than 400 technology new projects, despite the fact that the country's population is only 1.3 million people.State support: Positive involvement of the private sector in public policy and legislation. A simplified procedure for registering new business projects, software ones including. Banks have their own innovative units and accelerators. So, together with Tallinn University of Technology, Swedbank created the Prototron project, which provides a prototyping infrastructure and support for innovative ideas.Startup Estonia helps replenish the local new businesses ecosystem. The Ministry of Economics is helping to provide loans and guarantees for small businesses. Promoting innovation and strengthening entrepreneurial thinking in society. If a company doesn’t take its income, but reinvests it in business development, it’s exempt from paying tax on money that has been reinvested.More information about this you can learn here ➜ Top 5 best countries to outsource software development in 2020.

I think Russians understand Russia and Putin better than you. Did you learn the history?To understand Putin you need to understand what happened to Russia after perestroika. Putin is no more corrupt than American presidents including Obama.Is Russia an imperialist country?In political and military sense, Russia is still a great power, but in economic terms it is an almost semi-colonial second-class nation.Capitalist Russia has again, 30 years after the end of the Cold War, been assigned the role of the number one enemy of the capitalist world.It is an undeserved role because Russia has done everything to please Western capitalism since the 1991 counter-revolution, and because Russia has neither the economic nor the military strength to wear this enemy costume.Capitalist Russia is of course 'a great power. It is given by the size itself. A country that spans almost the entire northern part of the Eurasian continent, with a population of 146 million, possessing almost inexhaustible raw material resources - and possessing the world's second largest nuclear arsenal - is a great power.But to properly understand Russia, one must examine the country's place in the global capitalist system of which Russia is now a part.Is Russia an imperialist superpower that challenges other imperialist superpowers over world domination, as some savvy people from both right and left claim? Or does Russia play a more subordinate role in the fight between financial capital?In Lenin's book "The Highest Stage of Imperialism", he defined five points. Here are the three most relevant in the analysis of today's Russia:• The merging of bank capital with industrial capital and the emergence of a financial oligarchy on the basis of this financial capital.• Capital exports, as opposed to exports of goods.• International monopolistic associations of capitalists, who divide the world among themselves.If we start from the end, with transnational corporations, we can quickly see that Russia is not much of a competitor in terms of the division of the world.USA and China share the top ten. China has 291 and the United States 560 companies on the 2000 list, half of the international monopolistic associations.India has 58, Canada 50, Australia 39 and Sweden 27 companies among the world's two thousand largest. Russia has 25 and six of 500.As a monopolistic superpower, the gigantic Russia is distanced by little Sweden.OF THE WORLD'S 100 LARGEST BANKS, ONE IS RUSSIAN. SWEDEN HAS FOUR.If we go further and look at the more general nature of the Russian economy, the picture becomes even clearer.During the 2000s, China has become the workshop of the entire capitalist world. Today, there is not a single global company that does not profit from China's cheap labor. The transformation has led to China today accounting for 20 percent of the world's production of manufactured goods, where simpler production, such as in the textile industry, has subsequently been supplemented with high-tech manufacturing.In second place in the manufacturing league comes the United States, despite the fact that a large part of their manufacturing industry has moved abroad, to Mexico and later to China and other countries in Southeast Asia.Russia comes first in fifteenth place with one percent of manufacturing output, surpassed by India, Taiwan, Mexico and Brazil.One exception saves Russia from the league's bottom swamp, the legacy of the Cold War. Russia remains one of the world's largest arms producers with 22 % of the world's arms exports. At the top is, of course, the United States with almost 40 %. The US arms industry has not been outsourced.You hardly need to turn the coin to figure out what the back looks like. Every country lagging behind in terms of manufacturing industry must producse raw materials in order to survive in a globalized economy.This is a traditional capitalist division of labor, in fact older than imperialism. Developed capitalist countries sell manufactured goods. Colonies are plundered of their raw materials.Russia plays an almost semicolonial role. 82 % of Russian exports consist of raw materials, primarily oil and gas, but also of metals and wood products, which gives Russia a subordinate, dependent position on the world market. Commodity-producing countries are disadvantaged by unfair trade conditions and they are constantly exposed to price speculation in the commodity markets.This subordinate position makes Russia a relatively poor country. In GDP per capita Russia ranks in 61st place, surpassed by Costa Rica, Panama, Romania and the Maldives.The financial capital and its oligarchs? Russia must be at the top there, right? It is crowded with Russian oligarchs, at least in the news media.Well, it's not that simple.Of the world's 100 largest banking giants, 20 are based in China, 10 in the United States, nine in Japan and six each in France, Germany and the United Kingdom. Little Sweden boasts four: Nordea, Handelsbanken, SEB and Swedbank.The oligarchs' Russia will have to make do with a single, state-owned Sberbank, which ranks 66th. Maybe that's why Russian oligarchs are forced to launder their dirty money via Nordea's, SEB's and Swedbank's Baltic branches.No, Russia is certainly not a great financial power.Capital exports from Russia, on the other hand, have been enormous since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Unfortunately, there are no reliable statistics on exports, especially not from the 1990s when the looting was criminal. But since 1999, when Vladimir Putin was elected president for the first time, Russia's central bank has estimated the total financial outflow at $ 1,000 billion.That is an incredible amount of money for a country where a large part of the population lives in poverty.Some of the money has gone to investments in the West, the oligarch Oleg Deripaska's purchase of what is today Kubal in Sundsvall to strengthen its position as dominant in the world's aluminum markets. Or as when the Russian gas company Gasprom builds pipelines such as Northstream 1 and 2. If you want to export gas, it must be transported.Or the Chelsea football team, a toy for Ibrahimovy.But on the whole, there is something strange about Russian capital exports. The two largest recipient countries for Russian capital, or Russian money, are Cyprus and the British Virgin Islands. Then it is not about investments but about securing stolen assets from clumsy tax authorities. That's why we talk about money, not capital. Money that is not invested for profit does not turn into capital.This is not about capital exports, but about money flight.Russian capitalism is far from imperialist in Lenin's economic sense; as a commodity exporter, it is rather semicolonial.Today's Russia is not a challenger in terms of domination of the capitalist world market, that struggle is being fought today by the United States and China and to some extent by the EU.FOR RUSSIA, THE RETURN OF CAPITALISM MEANT A GREATER ECONOMIC DISASTER THAN W W2.Before I deal with the political and military side, a few words about the development of Russian capitalism, how it was born out of a difficult bureaucratized, socialist system:Swedish neoliberal Anders Åslund, was hired as an adviser to Boris Yeltsin. He claimed that the first task was to "create a new class of owners". Of course, all capitalism needs an ownership class. But in Russia, the embryo was already in place several years before Åslund went on his neoliberal eastern mission.Bank Menatep:The year was 1988. Mikhail Gorbachev had led the Soviet Union for almost three years and his perestroika now gave Soviet citizens the right to form private companies in the form of cooperatives.At the headquarters of the Communist Youth League Komsomol in Moscow a group of going officials discussed the new possibilities. They came up with a brilliant idea: With money from Komsomol, they decided to form a new institution: "Center for scientific and technical creativity". The aim was to promote Komsomol members' "entrepreneurship".So it was, at least for the founders themselves. With capital from their new institution they started Bank Menatep a few months later with its new Komsomol institution as one of three cooperative owners and themselves as bank directors. The business went brilliant, not least because Menatep Bank offered its corrupt customers the service of laundering black money white.In 1990 the young bank directors redeemed the cooperative owners and transformed Bank Menatep into a limited company with themselves as shareholders. The arrangement was not legal, but in 1990 the Soviet authorities had lost control of the perestroika so the new shareholders could without risk take the law into their own hands.When the Soviet Union collapsed just over a year later, Bank Menatep was already an established commercial bank equipped to take part in the looting of the state's common property.Barely a decade later, in 2000, Bank Menatep's principal owner was named Russia's richest man and the sixteenth richest man in the world. He was then 39 years old and boasted a fortune of 15 billion dollars.Not bad by an enterprising young communist! Mikhail Khodorkovsky.Mikhail Khodorkovsky is typical of Anders Åslund's new capitalist class. Almost all so-called oligarchs were taken from different parts of the Soviet bureaucracy and almost all began their capitalist career during the Soviet era through dizzying business and criminal looting.This process is not unique to Russian capitalism. Sweden does the same.In "Das Kapital", Karl Marx sums up the birth of capital in the following words: "If money came into the world with natural bloodstains on one cheek, then capital comes to the world dripping blood and dirt from all pores, from head to toe."Let us never forget that the birth of capitalism in our part of the world was based on the extermination of indigenous peoples in America and Australia, on the slave trade from Africa and on the proletarianization of Europe's poor.Yet the brutality of the birth of Russian capitalism is important to understand its character because the birth is so close in time. Although the majority of Russian capitalists began to kick in the Soviet belly as early as the late 1980s, the birth itself took place in the 1990s with devastating results for the vast majority of people in Russia.Between 1991 and 1995, Russia's GDP fell by 46 percent, industrial production by 46 percent, food production by 32 percent and investment by 61 percent.By comparison, Nazi Germany's war of aggression against the Soviet Union in 1941-1945, which included 25 million deaths and the destruction of entire parts of the country, resulted in a fall in GDP of 22 percent.For Russia, therefore, the return of capitalism meant a greater economic catastrophe than World War II!In 1989, the Soviet military budget was 40 percent of that in the United States. 2018 WAS LESS THAN TEN.The Russian capitalism of the 1990s was pure looting, where a small number of people, such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky, were able to make huge fortunes in a short time.It was basically about seizing state property in a "chaotic bourgeois privatization from above" process with a nod to the October Revolution, where the nationalizations in the early years went much further than Lenin intended in a process that a contemporary observer called "chaotic proletarian nationalization from below ”.Both terms are relevant.If we go back to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, he and Bank Menatep made their big cut in 1996. Khodorkovsky and six other oligarchs with the help from USA pr firms secured Boris Yeltsin's victory in the presidential election this year, and as a thank you for their help they were rewarded with a program called "share loans":The seven oligarchs would lend money to the state against security in shares in state-owned companies. But the intention was never for the state to repay the loans, instead Yeltsin almost gave away the most profitable state-owned companies.Khodorkovsky seized the oil company Yukos, Mikhail Friedman oil company Tyumen and Vladimir Potanin, Oleg Deripaska and Roman Abramovich took over the huge metal company Norilsk Nickel.It is the looter Deripaska who now owns Kubal in Sundsvall. Abramovij bought Chelsea.But how could these seven have enough money to finance the Russian state?The year was 1992. Soviet price controls on consumer goods were abolished and hyperinflation of 2,600 percent immediately hit Russia. In a single year, the price of a kilo of meat rose from two to 3,187 rubles per kilo. People starved and the former Soviet citizens lost all their savings in one swoop. And pensions.But it is also possible to make money on inflation, especially in the bastard economy that existed in Russia in the first years after the "liberalization". The central bank did not raise the lending rate in line with inflation, but only to between 10 and 25 per cent. Hence:Anyone who took out a loan of 10 million rubles from the central bank on 1 January 1992 was able to repay the loan a year later at a real value of 40,000 rubles, including interest and bribes.What do you do with ten million rubles in a collapsing economy? The best and most popular was the oil trade.Price controls were not abolished on everything, such as oil. In 1992, it was therefore possible to buy Russian oil at one hundredth of the world market price. Those with good contacts in the state bureaucracy, which remained Soviet, rushed to the central bank and took out a loan of 10 million rubles, rushed on to their contact in the oil industry and bought oil for the money. Then on to the Ministry of Foreign Trade, where a good bribe immediately gave the export license. So simsalabim. In one swoop, 10 million rubles turned into 1,000 million with only small deductions for transportation, bribes and symbolic repayment of loans.It was on this type of business, which also included metals, that almost all Russian oligarchs made their fortunes.Talk about robber capitalism!Now a few words about oligarchs who are frequently used in terms of Russian big capitalists - but almost never about Western dittos who are called successful entrepreneurs.The Greek term "oligarchy" means "few mens power" and it is relevant to Russian 1990s when Khodorkovsky, Potanin, Friedman, Abrahamovich and others were not only capitalists but also politicians, the seven oligarchs who secured Yeltsin's election victory in 1996 and then ruled in practice not only their respective business empires but also the Russian state with assistance from well-to-do bribes to the gangster group around Yeltsin called the "Family".In the late 1990s, Russia was indeed an oligarchy, which makes it doubly ironic when charlatans like Stig Fredriksson try to save Yeltsin's honor as a "democrat". How can an oligarchy be democratic?It is now that Vladimir Putin enters the stage. The oligarchs quarrel over who found this pearl, an insignificant official of the St. Petersburg city administration until August 1999, when he was appointed prime minister. But it is clear that Putin was hand-picked by the oligarchic circle around Yeltsin.Less than six months later, when Putin was appointed president, he immediately thanked by signing the decree "Guarantees for the former president and members of his family" as a first step, giving Yeltsin and his daughters and sons-in-law lifelong immunity from the corruption charges against them.The "family" were, of course, happy, but the happiest were probably the seven oligarchs, who did not get their dirty hands washed in public trials.One year later, Putin signed a new decree with the same content, but applicable to all presidents of the Russian Federation, including himself.It is sometimes claimed that Vladimir Putin represents a return to planned economic conditions or some form of state capitalism.It's not true. The fact is that privatization policy continued at a steady pace during Putin's first two presidential terms and that it is still the main line of the Russian state's economic policy, despite the fact that there is less and less left to privatize, or steal . When Putin became president again in 2012 after the intermission with Dmitry Medvedev, he signed the decree "On the state's long-term economic policy" which states that all remaining state-owned assets will be sold - "except natural monopolies, natural resources and assets related to defense".The schedule was delayed, but in 2016 Putin announced the sale of state-owned "crown jewels" such as the diamond company Alrosa, the airline Aeroflot, the oil company Rosneft and Russia's railways.Putin is not some kind of disguised anti-capitalist or even a state capitalist, which he himself rejects, but his ambition has been and continues to be to make Russian capitalism work in a more decent market economy way after the ravages of predatory capitalism in the 1990s. His goal:• State-owned companies must continue to be sold - but they must not be donated.• Capitalist market economy is good, but it needs some regulation.• The capitalists should not rule over the state, but the state should rule for them.This is roughly how one sums up Vladimir Putin's economic policy and it does not differ significantly from the economic policy of other countries, possibly with the exception of this with the capitalists' direct involvement in politics, which was a phenomenon with Russian overtones. And the United States lobbyists.Putin's first move was to clean up the swamp of swindlers that the oligarchs had set up for themselves. As a warning example, he chose former young communist Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whose company Yukos was sued in 2003 for tax fraud and sentenced to pay $ 33 billion in unpaid taxes, including interest and hefty penalties. Yukos had his assets in Cyprus and in Swiss banks not in Russia, so the company went bankrupt and Khodorkovsky himself had to crawl into the finch, which in the West was called a political trial.It was no coincidence that Putin and his tax advisers chose Mikhail Khodorkovsky as a warning example. Khodorkovsky, along with Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, belonged to a small group of oligarchs who refused to relinquish their political power; Khodorkovsky even boasted that he had a hundred Duma members on his payroll. That ambition did not suit Putin, so Khodorkovsky ended up in the cage, despite not fiddling more than the other oligarchs.But he didn't suffer much. Once the example was set, Khodorkovsky was pardoned by Putin, with a good portion of his billions secured in Swiss banks..As for relations with the capitalist world market of which Russia became a full part in the 1990s, Putin initially had no ambition whatsoever to limit this integration - it was the domestic oligarchs, those who ruled over Yeltsin and thus over the Russian state, he wanted.Russia joined the G8 in 1998 and the World Trade Organization in 2012. The following year, a decision was made to include Russia in the OECD. During his first years as president, Putin spoke of possible membership of both the EU and NATO.Integration went painlessly. Putin accepted the subordinate role given by Russia's economic collapse in the 1990s, well aware that oil exports were the key to both Russia's economic recovery and to his own power. Also at the political level, the attitude of the imperialism, especially USAs, was benevolent. Putin was the first to express solidarity with the United States after the attack against World Trade Center 11/11 2001 and when George W Bush a month later attacked Afghanistan, Putin immediately opened Russian airspace for US transport to the war. In 2012, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov offered Uljanovsk as a hub for the transports to Afghanistan, an offer that immediately led to protests in Lenin's birth place. But Lavrov received unreserved support of Putin. Russia agreed in NATO's partnership for peace, PFP already in 1994. and 2002, under the first presidential period of Putin, the NATO-Russian Council was established as a bilateral cooperation in the so-called war against terrorism. By now, Russia was given a permanent ambassador in Natos headquarters in Brussels. That with PFP is a bit fun. Sweden is also in PFP and until 2013, Swedish and Russian military joined in various NATO exercises as in the annual margin exercise Baltops in the Baltic Sea. Russia's submission to the United States and NATO in the period until 2013 is almost amazing. Then Russia in 2011 gave green light for the bomb war against Libya by refraining from Veto in UN Security Council.In February 1990, when Michail Gorbatjov was still President of the Soviet Union, the United States Foreign Minister James Baken issued a solemn promise. "NATO will not be moved an inch east," he explained, a promise that international law experts consider as legally binding even though the Naive Gorbatjov did not demand it written. Since then, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Montenegro, Slovakia and Albania have been listed as members of NATO. Russia and Putin just gave a vague protest when the former Soviet Republics Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania 2004 became part of both NATO and the EU.Everything turned around in 2013, when the United States, the EU and NATO began to cast lustful glances at Ukraine, which Russia categorically opposed, which requires an explanation. Why is ex-Soviet Ukraine so special in relation to ex-Soviet Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania?One could answer that Ukraine is much larger than the tiny Baltic states and therefore of greater geopolitical interest. But that would be to simplify the issue.In his annual speech to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation in 2005, Vladimir Putin hinted at the more complex answer. ambition to re-establish the socialist Soviet Union.This is false evidence. Putin is not talking nostalgically about the socialist Soviet Union, he absolutely does not want it back, but is worried about Russia. Which is given in the following sentence of the speech. "For the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our citizens and compatriots were outside Russian territory," Putin said.It is not the collapse of socialism that constitutes the catastrophe - it is welcomed by Putin - but the disintegration and division of the Russian nation.THE RUSSIAN RESPONSE TO THE WESTERN POWER INVOLVEMENT IN UKRAINE AUTUMN 2013 AND SPRING 2014 WAS GIVEN.Vladimir Putin is a Russian nationalist, which is why he is so popular in some Swedish and French right wing circles. But as a Russian nationalist, he sees himself not only as a representative of the citizens of Russia, but of all Russians, also of the tens of millions of Russians who, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, live in the diaspora, not least in Ukraine.Yes, more than that. In the national mythology that is Putin's ideological home, there is an expanded Russian nation with roots in the historic Kievrus in the ninth century, founded by the Swedish Viking Rurik. This nation includes not only the Great Russians, but also the Belarusians and the Little Russians (Ukrainians) united by dialects of the Russian language and by Orthodox Christianity.It was this Russian mentality that created the Crimean War by protecting the Orthodox in Romania, Moldova from Ottoman oppression.In 2005, Putin had the body of the white General Anton Denikin exhumed from his grave in Chicago, where he had been since 1946, to transport the remains to a new burial in Moscow. In 2009, Putin honored the worst butcher of the Civil War by visiting his new grave. In front of an assembled press contingent, he emphasized Denikin as a great Russian nationalist and emphasized in particular Denikin's view that "no one should be allowed to interfere in Russia's internal and small affairs".Russia's resilience to the United States and NATO was broken by the events in Ukraine in 2013, where the Western powers were involved in the coup.One must be extremely careful when citing ideological reasons for political actions, as a rule there are always sharp materialistic reasons behind it, but here nationalism plays a big role.Releasing Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania went well, despite the fact that both Estonia and Latvia have large Russian populations. But when the United States, the EU and NATO cast lustful glances at Little Russia, they crossed an unacceptable border. No Russian national leader can agree to an outsider splitting this mythical community, then he or she loses his or her legitimacy.The Russian reaction to the intervention of the Western powers in Ukraine in the autumn of 2013 and the spring of 2014 was a given. It was a pure and deliberate provocation and that it would lead to Russian countermeasures, such as the readmission of Crimea, was self-evident. The price has since been paid by the United States through Russia's intervention in Syria.It is not the case that Russia, which supported the war of aggression against Afghanistan and the bomb war against Libya, has suddenly become anti-imperialist. Russia is acting on the basis of its own interests in Syria, where not least Ukraine is in the pot. If the US, the EU and NATO give up their plans to "take over" Ukraine, then Russia is ready to return to the timid line that applied until 2013.In summary: In an economic sense, Russia is an almost semi-colonial second-class nation in the competition on the capitalist world market, completely left to the fluctuations of the global commodity exchanges.In the political and military sense, Russia is still a great power, not least through its possession of nuclear weapons. But without any desire to withdraw from the community they were part of until the autumn of 2013. It is the Western powers' clumsiness regarding Ukraine - Little Russia - that has caused the current crisis.Russia is not an aggressive superpower, other than in relation to what is seen as an attack on the interests of the enlarged Russian nation.There is sometimes talk of Russian rearmament and it is true that the Russian military budget more than quadrupled between 1998 and 2018, from 14 to 61.4 billion dollars in fixed monetary value. But then you should know that the Soviet Union in 1989 had a military budget of 231.8 billion dollars in the same fixed monetary value.Today's Russian military budget is thus only a quarter of the Soviet one.In 1989, the Soviet military budget accounted for 40 percent of that in the United States. In 2018, the Russian military budget accounts for less than 10 percent of the US.These are figures that provide perspective on the alleged Russian threat.