Naked Capitalism has the article Jeffrey Sommers/Michael Hudson: Russia, Crimea and the Consequences of NATO Policy.

Russia today has watched covert attempts from the US State Department to the National Endowment for Democracy and other NGOs to break up their country as part of what is becoming a triumphalist global pattern. This threatens to remake their “near abroad” into a neoliberal periphery. Today’s confrontation has taken on an existential character for Russia since it saw NATO’s moves toward Georgia as cutting too close to the bone. The prospects of NATO assimilating Ukraine (Kiev) represents a seizure of Russia’s “heart”: the very ancestral home where Russia was founded and on which it repelled the fascist invasion in the Great Patriotic War–as it had a millennium earlier against the German Crusading Knights pledged to exterminate the Russian-Greek Orthodox population.

Most Russians never forgave Gorbachev for the deal he made with NATO. Russian diplomats have stated clearly that Ukraine is a line that cannot be crossed regarding potential NATO expansion. It is as if foreign agents worked in Texas to mobilize a violent ethnic minority to rejoin Mexico and then place a hostile military alliance on the US border.

My purpose in publishing the links to these articles is not an effort to condone what Russia is doing.  Instead it is an attempt to understand what may be behind their policies.  Whatever actions we decide to take in response to Russian actions, they are unlikely to work if we do not understand the Russians.  An action we might think should encourage the Russians to change course in a direction we prefer, might just have the opposite effect if we do not understand Russian thinking.  In fact, I think this is exactly what is happening.  This is why I urge our own diplomats and leaders to try to understand what is happening from the other sides’ point of view.