Russia’s unease is heightened by the knowledge that the country’s sheer size is the product of a history of imperial expansion at the expense of its Asian neighbors, including China. In the 1600s, Russia’s land surface almost trebled, as the country expanded beyond the Ural Mountains.16 By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Russia had become, in the words of the historian John Darwin, “after Britain, the second greatest imperial power in Asia and a colossal colonialist.” Tsarist Russia played a crucial role in the “demolition of the old China-centred world order in East Asia.”17 Much of
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