"The temptation of the West for Putin was, I think, chiefly that he saw it as instrumental to building a great Russia. He was always obsessed with the 25 million Russians trapped outside Mother Russia..."

"... by the breakup of the Soviet Union. Again and again he raised this. That is why, for him, the end of the Soviet empire was the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century."

Said Condoleezza Rice, quoted in "The Making of Vladimir Putin/The 22-year arc of the Russian president’s exercise of power is a study in audacity" by Roger Cohen (NYT). 

This is a very substantial article, and there are some excellent photographs — Putin scaring Angel Merkel with a dog, George W. Bush yukking it up with a smilingly sober Putin. 

I'll just add a bit:

Born in 1952 in a city then called Leningrad, Mr. Putin grew up in the shadow of the Soviets’ war with Nazi Germany, known to Russians as the Great Patriotic War. His father was badly wounded, an older brother died during the brutal 872-day German siege of the city, and a grandfather had worked for Stalin as a cook.

The immense sacrifices of the Red Army in defeating Nazism were not abstract but palpable within his modest family, as for many Russians of his generation. Mr. Putin learned young that, as he put it, “the weak get beat.”

“The West did not take sufficient account of the strength of Soviet myth, military sacrifice and revanchism in him,” [said Michel Eltchaninoff, the French author of “Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin"], whose grandparents were all Russian, said. “He believes deeply that Russian man is prepared to sacrifice himself for an idea, whereas Western man likes success and comfort.”...

[Putin] was the first to call President Bush after 9/11 [and] an important potential ally in what came to be called the Global War on Terror. It meshed with his own war in Chechnya and with a tendency to see himself as part of a civilizational battle on behalf of Christianity. But Mr. Putin was far less comfortable with Mr. Bush’s “freedom agenda,” announced in his second inaugural of January 2005, a commitment to promote democracy across the world in pursuit of a neoconservative vision.

In every stirring for liberty, Mr. Putin now saw the hidden hand of the United States. And why would Mr. Bush not include Russia in his ambitious program?... When François Hollande, the former French president, met Mr. Putin several years later, he was surprised to find him referring to Americans as “Yankees” — and in scathing terms. These Yankees had “humiliated us, put us in second position,” Mr. Putin told him.

NATO was an organization “aggressive by its nature,” used by the United States to put Russia under pressure, even to stir democracy movements....

The United States and its allies, in Mr. Putin’s telling, were intent on globalizing these subversive values under cover of democracy promotion and human rights. Saint Russia would stand against this baleful homogenization. Putinism, as it was now fleshed out, stood against a Godless and insinuating West. Moscow had an ideology once more. It was one of conservative resistance, and it appealed to rightist leaders across Europe and beyond....