My understanding is less complete than many of the other socialists. The other communists can explain this better than I can.

Capitalist Logic behind expansion into Russia

The American state continues to exist because its inhabitants an elevated standard of living due to unequal exchange with the third world. It operates on a more developed and sophisticated method of colonial extraction that it inherited in its more primitive state from the British Empire.

It’s current form leans more towards predatory finance, withholding access to USD and trade networks which other more theoretically developed socialists will be able to explain in more detail.

The simplest way to illustrate this logic, which is the only logic governing the state, is you can recursively extract wealth by taking low value-form (unrefined, i.e ore) goods from a vulnerable country, use your means of production to turn them into higher value from goods (i.e stainless steel medical needles) and sell it back to the third world country in order to buy more raw materials. You use this surplus to buy land, corporations, additional means of production, at home, in the colony, and abroad, and use this advantage to set up the necessary apparatus to keep this extraction going in perpetuity. Else the ‘native’ population will seek to retain this surplus value in order to develop their own means of production and cut out the colonizer entirely. The American state cannot survive if this happens, the only way to keep the economy moving once the logic of capital has broken (no returns on investment) and maintain the living standards expected by the American population is to transition to a centralized planned economy.

Inevitability of Communism and Socialism, peaceful transition and violent reaction

The American state has done this many times in the past when it felt threatened, it used a command economy to a great extent during the Roosevelt Era (WW2) and the Keynesian period that followed it. There was even an understanding between the Roosevelt Administration, and CPSU under General Secretary Joseph Stalin, that the American economy, in its highly potent and planned form, would logically, eventually, peacefully transition to the fully planned and superior socialist mode of production. Post WW2 would be peaceful co-existence between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the natal centrist Social Democratic United States, this was obviously quashed after the death of Roosevelt, and the existing internal powers of the United States in the 1940s to now would never cede power.

The problem with the Keynesian model of the Roosevelt period, is that domestic production and full employment gives labor - workers - an almost unlimited amount of proportional leverage. The United States saw massive organized labor action in the early 20th century. The Communist Party of the United States had meetings and marches numbering in the tens of thousands in New York City alone. The marginalized communities of the United States, black radicals, indigenous radicals, and queer radicals would consolidate and force the United States into socialism. White supremacy would be rooted out by revolutionary workers councils, that we know as soviets. The transition to socialism in the United States, and therefore, the world, was inevitable.

In order to prevent this, the former aristocrats and golden-era bourgeoisie, inheritors of the American, and British Empire, enjoyers of the virtually unlimited amounts of wealth, the ability to wield virtually unlimited power, to commit unrestricted violence, access to personal armies, personal islands, yachts, women and children, accumulated via the aforementioned methods of extraction described above, would defend their positions, and defend their holdings, just as anybody in power today, and their forebearers have done (else we would have transitioned to socialism already, as power structures do not hold the tides history at bay on thin air).

Russia Today

Fast forward to today (because I’m getting tired). The Soviets, the lone surviving internationalist socialist revolution, was brought down by material limits and 70 years of an uninterrupted defensive war against the United States. The democratic socialists, social democrats and Keynesians had long ago lost the struggle for power in the United States, the path of peaceful co-existence permanently foreclosed - if it ever existed to begin with, and now the international positions of socialist construction were scattered to the winds. The Communist Party of China strategically retreated, using their vast and highly educated population to seize the means of production from within the world capitalist system.

The Russian Federation, spitting on the ashes of the Soviet dream of a socialist world and the bodies of every democratic socialist riddled by the guns and bombs of reaction, attempted to build a capitalist order amid the unending Western looting of public assets, land and means of production in the 90s. The traitors to the Soviet Union were promised the same levels of wealth and power held by their Western counterparts, they could not bear the embarrassment of being the dredges managing a resource colony pillaged by the West, they wanted autonomy and power - and they had both the education and opportunity to do so. Putin represents this consolidation of Russian national interests, the antithesis of the internationalist mission of the Soviets that they killed. The Russian national bourgeois, the scum that they are, did not want to cede power to the far greater global bourgeois.

I cannot say why the Russian capitalists did not integrate into the world capitalist system. Maybe it was pride. Maybe, from the West, it was spite. Maybe enough Marxist Soviet education persisted to allow them to remember what happens to the little capitalists.

This bloc has its own interests to defend. Not enough capital to export into other countries - not enough to carry out imperialism, not enough to buy out means of production abroad, not enough financial muscle to meaningfully subsume sovereign governments to their whims. Russia only exports roughly 5% of the Capital that the United States exports. Their only paths to international influence and national defense involve picking up the pieces of the anti-colonial struggle left behind by the Soviet Union - on behalf of capitalist governments, little capitalists like them, rather than the side of the labourers armed, educated, and trained by the Soviets. So weakened is their position that they are occasionally, even patronizingly, forced to align with socialist movements. Rarely. America is the biggest threat to the Russian Federation, and it will align with anyone willing to do so.

America and the Russian Federation: Big Bourgeoisie vs Little Bourgeoisie

America sought to completely obliterate the Soviet project, to win the great game of conquering Russia undertaken by the great capitalist powers, started long before the creation of the first Petrograd Soviet. It succeeded in shattering the once independent and self-sufficient eastern European republics. Destroying and shattering the independent socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. Only the stubbornest Russians resisted. Absorbing the right-wing reactionary institutions empowered by the United States to overthrow the secular left-wing Soviet Union. The United States was once again fighting it’s own reactionary puppet just as it had in Afghanistan.

Ukraine is one of these reactionary puppet states. Still loyal to its western owners. In order to keep and advance the unending extraction of surplus value and extend its reach to Moscow the west inflames racial tensions that were once virtually inexistent and pathetic during the anti-racist and solidarity-based Soviet era. No one listened to these fools until the Americans gave them guns. No one listened until they started shooting and killing.

American Race Wars

The fighting in the Donbass and Crimea is the culmination of a one-sided race war set alight by the United States. Architected by the same fascists that would do the same at home if given the opportunity. Inheritors of the same apparatus created by those that truly did fight a race war against Jews and Slavs during the second world war - NATO - when the United States absorbed the ashes and remaining radicals and fighters and leaders of Nazi Germany into the ranks of their anti-socialist crusade. Right wingers never let a good opportunity, good means, good weapons, fighters and terrorists - go to waste.

Ukrainian fascists, the big bourgeoise’s faction of choice, would fight a holy race war on their former neighbors in the Soviet Union. Once acceptable differences were enflamed, and the most violent were now given access to high explosive artillery and told to fire into the capital cities of Russian majority provinces.

The race war in Ukraine was supposed to draw the Russian Federation into another Afghanistan, to turn it even more into an international Pariah and swing the entire world capitalist system like an executioner’s axe on the little bourgeoisie. But the anti-materialism and rot at the heart of the world capitalist order is clearly setting in. They clearly can’t do it. The mistakes piled on that anti-colonialists in the Global South sense the weakness of their former masters. And they’ve brought a decent portion of the little bourgeois from all over the world together under the leadership of a Communist Superpower that governs almost 1/5th of the entire World Population.

My explanation is not representative of other socialists views or interpretations, I’m not a party member or part of a cadre, I am just a poster.