Heather Cox Richardson brillantly explains the history and politics that led up to the present mayhem :
"Forty-five years after Churchill warned that the world was splitting in two, it appeared that democracies, led by the United States of America, had won. In that triumphant mood, American leaders set out to spread capitalism into formerly communist countries, believing that democracy would follow since capitalism and democracy went hand in hand.

But history, in fact, was not over. Oligarchs in the former Soviet republics quickly began to consolidate formerly public property into their own hands. They did so through the use of what scholar Andrew Wilson called “virtual politics,” a system that came out of the techniques of state propaganda to become what he called “performance art.” By the early 2000s, the Russian state, under the control of former KGB agent Vladimir Putin, had a monopoly on “political technology,” which spread like wildfire as the internet became increasingly available.