In the western elites’ minds, when they “won” the Cold War, Russia became a defeated nation akin to that of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, or any other non-white nation which had been brought low- not a nation which had been compromised from within, such that its traitor elites had dismantled the Soviet Union in an attempt to join the west as a peer- but a nation which had entered the dustbin of history, and was now theirs to do with as they pleased (aka. balkanization, shock therapy, further and further encroachment and dictating the future of the nation to the “defeated subhumans”), while the “victory” of the west showed their supremacy and thus the “end of history” altogether- the white, western Aryan Anglo-Saxons had finally reached world hegemony, so “surely” they were simply superior, morally, ideologically, racially, culturally, economically- and that was that, the world had to accept that.

Obviously, this take on history and the world at large lacks any solid basis in reality. Russia still exists- it was weakened, but now it is undergoing a revitalization; and at no point in history did it cease to be a military superpower, and its industrial base, etc. remained strong. And even the most disenfranchised- “defeated”- nations, such as the resistance forces primarily made up of goatherders and tribesmen in Afghanistan, can resist and refuse this monstrous triumphalism, and give the empire a bloody nose and then some. But this is how they saw it.