Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
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10 HN comments
Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
Dava Sobel
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The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War
Malcolm Gladwell and Pushkin Industries
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Bowling Alone: Revised and Updated: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
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Common Sense: The Origin and Design of Government
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Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Edition
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2 HN comments
The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World
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2 HN comments
Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork
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Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World (Politics of Place)
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How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
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Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
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Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
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In Cold Blood
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A History of the World in 6 Glasses
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asciimikeonJuly 11, 2021
reducesufferingonApr 22, 2021
Prisoners of Geography is literally the name of the book determining this exact conclusion. Russia's history involves lots of invasions. (WW2 Germany, Mongols, etc.) Because of this, they want to secure the area around them geographically, whether by politically-aligned states or by controlling the territory themselves. West of Moscow is just huge plains, there's no defensible moat, so they think they need to secure all of the area until they geographically have a defensible moat for their army. That moat / natural barrier is the narrower choke-point on the left side of Poland, the Romanian mountains, Black Sea, and Baltic sea. That's also not-coincidentally what the USSR controlled. So Russia wants Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states, Moldova, and even Poland. That's why you see even Poland under Russian influence operations, as another commenter pointed out.