Russian society is firmly convinced that sooner or later a Western invasion is coming, and this belief is consciously reinforced daily by state propaganda, international relations and defence researcher Colin Smith — who was once expelled from Moscow while serving as a U.S. Marine Corps attaché — told LETA in an interview.
Smith said he has observed this conviction among Russians for many years: “In their minds, the question is not if the West will invade, but when it will invade. They remember Napoleon and Hitler and have convinced themselves that a Western invasion is only a matter of time.”
In his view, the narrative that NATO expanded into the Baltic states in 2004 and now supposedly wants to take over Ukraine or Georgia only strengthens this “paranoid psychosis.”
Smith, whose career spans nearly three decades and includes postings in various U.S. missions around the world, has been stationed in Moscow twice. He has travelled across Russia and spoken extensively with ordinary Russians.
“In these conversations, it becomes clear that they genuinely believe the West will invade,
because — in their view — the only way for the West to achieve its goal of destroying Russia and its power is to march on Moscow and conquer it. Of course, this is utterly ridiculous. Why would NATO ever invade Russia? There is simply no reason,” the expert said.
He pointed out that regardless of whether the Russian strategists advising Putin and his generals truly believe this or not, their strategic narrative consistently claims that NATO will invade.
Before the war, Russians were also told that Ukraine planned to invade Russia — which essentially meant that once Ukraine joined NATO, it would become a springboard for a Western invasion, and that Ukraine would become yet another former Soviet republic turned hostile to Russia.
Smith is convinced that
Russia’s goals have not changed over the past decade:
Russians will do everything they can to divide NATO and make the Alliance appear less unified. He suggested that President Vladimir Putin may once have been open to coexisting with the West, but after seeing “how the West failed to use its opportunities and abandoned Russia in the 1990s, he said — no, we must return to the old Soviet style and restore our power.”
“This is his way of trying to achieve that. But the Russians badly underestimated Ukraine’s resolve, and they experienced the exact opposite reaction in Sweden and Finland. They wanted NATO to stop expanding — yet they themselves convinced two nations that had been neutral for 70–80 years to join the Alliance,” Smith told LETA. Smith had also previously been posted in Riga.
Smith was cautious in forecasting Russia’s future, noting that the country continues to surprise economists who predicted its economy should have collapsed by now — yet it hasn’t. He pointed out that economists rarely mention the rapidly growing services sector in Russia. Previously, such a sector barely existed because it typically relies on disposable income, which Russians did not have — but now soldiers and their families do. Smith stresses that this service-based economy has now emerged in Russia, which reminds him of the U.S. economy, where services dominate.
The expert believes that this service economy in Russia may remain viable as long as Russia has a partner like China, which continues to buy Russian goods, oil, energy, and technology, and maintains technological cooperation.
“How sustainable this cooperation is, however, is another question. One day Russia will have to wake up and realise that China is not its friend either. What happens to Russia then, I don’t know, because by that point it will be completely isolated from the world,” Smith said. He also noted that Russia has very little external debt, whereas the U.S. national debt is $37 trillion — “yet nobody questions our economy.”
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