Chapo did an excellent interview with Norman Finkelstein a while ago where Norm points out the Early Life section of Putin's Wikipedia page:

Putin's birth was preceded by the deaths of two brothers: Albert, born in the 1930s, died in infancy, and Viktor, born in 1940, died of diphtheria and starvation in 1942 during the Siege of Leningrad by Nazi Germany's forces in World War II.[29][30]

Putin's mother was a factory worker, and his father was a conscript in the Soviet Navy, serving in the submarine fleet in the early 1930s. During the early stage of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, his father served in the destruction battalion of the NKVD.[31][32][33] Later, he was transferred to the regular army and was severely wounded in 1942.[34] Putin's maternal grandmother was killed by the German occupiers of Tver region in 1941, and his maternal uncles disappeared on the Eastern Front during World War II.[35]

He infers from this that Putin seems to have grown up in the shadow of the ravages of the Nazi invasion of the USSR, which notoriously went how it went in part because Stalin underestimated how quickly the Nazis would attack. He took a passive approach despite the Nazis being on his doorstep and something like 20 million Soviet civilians died for it.

This isn't to lay very much blame on Stalin, I don't know enough about the situation to do so, but it does lend itself to the lesson that when scratched liberals are right there, existentially threatening you, you don't just wait for them to pull the trigger.

Norm put it much better than I could have. I believe it's buried somewhere in this episode: https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/718-the-view-feat-norman-finkelstein-32823 which is mostly about other things.

The West was certainly playing 'im not touching you' with Russia. Russia just called the bluff.