Seeing the Forest from the Trees:
So let's get real for a moment. This war is not Putin vs. the Ukranian people. It is with NATO and the US, and the relatively new regime they created/control in Ukraine. He is not trying to resurrect the Soviet Union. Or take over Eastern Europe and make it part of Russian territory. Putin is trying to restore Russia and Eastern Europe to the strength and culture it once had long before Communism, Nazism, or the rise of the western United Nations.
We have tunnel vision on this. We are looking at the trees, when we should be looking at the forest. This is about the history, culture, and religion of Europe, past and present, that is of Western Europe vs. Eastern Europe.
The Historical Perspective:
Christendom once stretched from Western Europe and the western Holy Roman Empire all the way east in the eastern (Byzantine) Holy Roman Empire, to the eastern most borders of Russia. United either under the Pope in the West, and western monarchies working integrally with the Church, or under the Orthodox Patriarch of the East, also united with the Russian czars.
Except for schism, and obvious ethnic differences like language and food, the Russian east and the Roman west were very much on the same page in terms of Christianity, Christian culture, and the unity between Church and state. For the better part of a millennium. Until roughly just the last 100 years.
But we got the "Enlightenment," which eventually gave us romanticist liberalism and social democracy in the west, and Marxist totalitarianism in the east. Either way, the "Old World Order" of Catholic Christendom in the west, going back to Constantine, represented by the Hapsburgs of the Austrio-Hungary Empire, the great emperors of the western Holy Roman Empire, gave way by the 20th century to the "New World Order"of Secular Humanism.
Whereas, the "Old World Order" of largely Orthodox Christendom in the east, going back to just before the Great Schism, which became represented by the Russian Empire, gave rise to the "New World Order" of Communism.
Check out the Russian Empire, and Eastern Europe
The Liberal West vs. the Traditional East:
However, as Providence would have it, capitalism and consumerist hedonism have rotted out the merits of social democracy in the west, resulting in the United States-NATO Empire presently spreading leftist, liberal capitalist culture (capitalism itself being good) to every continent as a tyrannically dogmatic system.
On the other hand, in the east, where capitalist vices did not take over everything the way it has in the west, relative poverty and traditional modes of culture were still observed as a buffer from the west, as you will see in many parts of Eastern Europe and Russian.
Russia being so geographically huge and isolated from western Europe, has become de facto and providentially the best remnant of Christendom in Europe, despite its obvious moral flaws, Russia after all being a Christian, European country.
This is how we have to look at the context of Putin invading Ukraine and his motives at this pinnacle moment. The Russian Orthodox Church is still almost entirely identical in orthodox doctrine and traditional, orthodox praxis with Traditional Roman Catholicism, with the exceptions of a few heretical problems and the formal schism. Yet the ROOC has remained a major influence over politics and government.
And over the present regime under Putin.
Aristocracy vs. Oligarchy:
Of course Russian oligarchs have certain corruption. But some are truly "aristocratic," per the meaning of that term, in that they rule not only from private interest, personal wealth and power, and purely material goals, but also from some degree of "wisdom and virtue," which St. Thomas and Aristotle highlight as the distinguishing features of "aristocracy" vs. "oligarchy." And from religious faith in God, and a desire to serve the Kingship of Christ. Some basically do on some level. On some level, based on listening to and reading many of his interviews, I think that extends to Putin as well.
We are on the brink of world war. If/when Biden attacks Russia, God forbid, Putin has said he will immediately attack the US and the West the likes we have never seen before, which means nuclear hits on our nuclear silos and military installations. We all would wake up one morning to instant global terror.
This man is not going to nuke civilians. He is an old school Russian politician, the kind that ruled the Christian Russian Empire long before the Soviets cancelled the monarchy and stole the government. However unjustifiably brutal his tactics are -- or are not -- he is not a mad man ready to do what Hitler did.
Or for that matter what the US did to Nagasaki or Hiroshima.
This is my opinion, for what it is worth.
Conclusion:
As the West continues to morally implode in its downward slide into the abyss, it will be de facto Russia and Eastern Europe who will preserve and restore what is left of Christendom in Europe. I imagine that there will be two new empires that emerge. One will be the Masonic New World Order in the west, united under the Great Reset, using woke politics and cultural Marxism to turn everything into a Big Brother collective. NATO will ultimately represent the "One World Government," but not over the whole world, but the west.
Whereas, I imagine that everything good is shifting to Russia and Eastern Europe forming their own renewed Christian Old World Order, but with a modern infrastructure and economy, forming their own version of NATO and the United Nations.
God willing, the Russian/Slavic culture will continue to stand up to the dictatorial moral relativism of the West: i.e. abortion activism, LGBTQ activism, critical race theory, wokism, radical third wave feminism (i.e. "femi-nazism), and ultimately anti-Catholic and anti-Christian bigotry enshrined into law.
And once the old liberal, baby boomer, Vatican II Catholic priests die out, here in the west, eventually (relatively soon) to be replaced with Tradition-oriented young priests and bishops, who will one day become once again Traditional Catholic Popes, interpreting the Council in light of Tradition, then it is conceivable that a restored, strong Papacy will one day help reunite the Russian Orthodox Church to unity with Rome. A Traditional Pope then one day leading spiritually, per the doctrine of the Social Kingship of Christ, a restoration of Christendom and perhaps even monarchy in the West, united with the East.
One can only hope.
And that would point to an era of peace, under Jesus Christ and His Church. Perhaps in our lifetimes. Unless these are literally the last days, and the Second Coming occurs very soon.
It is a very interesting time to be alive, that is for sure. Praying for peace that world war does not break out. Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us.