“Russian President Vladimir Putin and much of today’s Russian elite have expressed much angst in recent decades regarding the potential military threat presented by NATO’s inexorable post-Soviet era march east as well as the threat of internal destabilization by “fifth columns” fomented by Western meddling in Russia and its near abroad. In his famous February 2007 speech at the international security conference in Munich, Putin expressed a view of many, though far from all Russians. He decried the West’s broken promise that it would not expand NATO beyond West Germany, drawing the connection between the external threat and Russia’s domestic order.” [Hahn, 20 21:3]