George W. Bush famously promised us a humble foreign policy in his Inaugural Address. What we actually got, after 9/11, was a foreign policy based on the premise that liberal democracies could not exist safely until autocracy had been eliminated everywhere. We know how that turned out.
The Bolsheviks similarly believed, in the early days of their revolution, that they could not survive capitalist hostility without revolutions elsewhere in Europe. While the Communist regime ultimately imploded, the system did not fail simply because capitalism thrived in Europe and the United States. On that point, Stalin was more correct than his Old Bolshevik opponents.
Putin, by contrast, appears to think that his illiberal kleptocracy cannot survive on its own, and that authoritarian regimes in countries close to Russia must be created or propped up, regardless of the cost or the ineptitude of their leaders. This is Bush/Bolshevik thought applied to reactionary–not liberal or revolutionary–ideology. Russia can’t afford it, any more than we could afford Bush.