It’s not really the case though. We can definitely see how Putin’s Russia don’t do landgrab because well, they don’t, they don’t even grab anything in central Asia and Caucasus even though the region is notoriously unstable in most part because of constant USA meddling even despite not only a lot of people there would welcome Russia and it would be incredibly advantageous to Russia to secure the trade routes (like Kazakhstan) which are in constant threat of regime change.
In fact we could see this clearly in cases of South Osetia which was in process of ethnically cleansed by Georgia but Russia after their military intervention was content to return to status quo and didn’t even annexed South Ossetia not to mention any other part of Georgia. Next was Kazakhstan where Russia helped to foil the colour coup but then just retreated. And Armenia which had its western comprador government betray the people and allowed Azerbadijan (yet another western supported country) to annex and ethnically cleans Nagorno Karabach - Russia proposed help but were refused and did nothing despite having a nominal alliance.
About Ukraine, right now Russia is clearly liberating separatist regions which Ukraine was ethnically cleansing for 9 years before Russia joined the ongoing civil war, and didn’t even do it to all of them. We could really only call this any land grab if Russia annex lands west of Kharkov and Odessa.
It’s not really the case though. We can definitely see how Putin’s Russia don’t do landgrab because well, they don’t, they don’t even grab anything in central Asia and Caucasus even though the region is notoriously unstable in most part because of constant USA meddling even despite not only a lot of people there would welcome Russia and it would be incredibly advantageous to Russia to secure the trade routes (like Kazakhstan) which are in constant threat of regime change.
In fact we could see this clearly in cases of South Osetia which was in process of ethnically cleansed by Georgia but Russia after their military intervention was content to return to status quo and didn’t even annexed South Ossetia not to mention any other part of Georgia. Next was Kazakhstan where Russia helped to foil the colour coup but then just retreated. And Armenia which had its western comprador government betray the people and allowed Azerbadijan (yet another western supported country) to annex and ethnically cleans Nagorno Karabach - Russia proposed help but were refused and did nothing despite having a nominal alliance.
About Ukraine, right now Russia is clearly liberating separatist regions which Ukraine was ethnically cleansing for 9 years before Russia joined the ongoing civil war, and didn’t even do it to all of them. We could really only call this any land grab if Russia annex lands west of Kharkov and Odessa.