>>When Russia lost the Cold War most people in the West saw it as a victory of democracy and capitalism over socialist authoritarianism.

I worked in high tech at the time. I - and pretty much every other coworker I spoke with - considered it to be more of a "command economies don't work". I'd add that in the USSR people who were responsible for production had incentive to lie about their own numbers (which might be a feature of authoritarian systems in general).

Capitalism isn't as efficient (multiple producers guessing as to what will 'sell' into whatever market is absorbing their product and unconstrained it seems to lead almost inevitably into Dickensian England squalor for the non-rich or the excesses of the 'Gilded' age.

If you look at the RU, immediately post USSR collapse, they seemed to have jumped into unconstrained capitalism. The mistake of the West was first letting the 'finance bros' loose and then completely ignoring the ongoing situation there (9/11, then the 'war on terror', including an unprovoked attack on Iraq). That 'finance bro' capitalism turned into gangster rule is somewhat unsurprising.

The TL;DR of this is that the West is somewhat at fault here and at a minimum we need to protect the ex-USSR states from the now-gangster RU.

You're more hopeful about the RU after all this than I am. Unless the RU dissolves and stops being the 'prison of nations' all we can do is isolate them.