On March 2, the United Nations General Assembly voted, 141 to 5, on a resolution condemning Russia for invading Ukraine. India, the world’s largest democracy, abstained from the vote.

It wasn’t India’s first abstention. India is also reportedly in talks to buy Russian oil at a discount, and is seeking to find ways to maintain trade relations despite the West’s sanctions against Moscow. For India, these choices are a way to avoid choosing. Take the vote: It wasn’t an outright condemnation of Russia’s actions, but it also wasn’t a declaration of support.

Those choices speak to the delicate geopolitical balancing act India is trying to strike amid this Ukraine war. Maintaining its longstanding friendship with Russia, even as it grows closer to the United States and its partners, always involved a complicated calculus. But it fits with India’s desire, especially as a post-colonial state, to look out for its own strategic interests.

Stephen Kotkin is one of our most profound and prodigious scholars of Russian history. His masterwork is a biography of Joseph Stalin. So far he has published two volumes—“Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and “Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941.” A third volume will take the story through the Second World War; Stalin’s death, in 1953; and the totalitarian legacy that shaped the remainder of the Soviet experience. Taking advantage of long-forbidden archives in Moscow and beyond, Kotkin has written a biography of Stalin that surpasses those by Isaac Deutscher, Robert Conquest, Robert C. Tucker, and countless others.

Kotkin has a distinguished reputation in academic circles. He is a professor of history at Princeton University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, at Stanford University. He has myriad sources in various realms of contemporary Russia: government, business, culture. Both principled and pragmatic, he is also more plugged in than any reporter or analyst I know. Ever since we met in Moscow, many years ago—Kotkin was doing research on the Stalinist industrial city of Magnitogorsk—I’ve found his guidance on everything from the structure of the Putin regime to its roots in Russian history to be invaluable.

I have only the greatest respect for George Kennan. John Mearsheimer is a giant of a scholar. But I respectfully disagree. The problem with their argument is that it assumes that, had nato not expanded, Russia wouldn’t be the same or very likely close to what it is today. What we have today in Russia is not some kind of surprise. It’s not some kind of deviation from a historical pattern. Way before nato existed—in the nineteenth century—Russia looked like this: it had an autocrat. It had repression. It had militarism. It had suspicion of foreigners and the West. This is a Russia that we know, and it’s not a Russia that arrived yesterday or in the nineteen-nineties. It’s not a response to the actions of the West. There are internal processes in Russia that account for where we are today.