You are cherry picking, as are the western media. You are attributing motivations and attitudes that simply do not exist, except in the fevered dreams of the neocons in DC and London.
The Russians are very happy to function as members of international organisations for mutual economic interest, trade and defense. They have the CIS, the EEU, the CSTO, the CISFTA. They do not need to go to war or conquer anyone. They are happy to trade.
Now of course they also have the BRICS and SCO working for them internationally.
It seems you are doing the classic "projection" that so plagues the West - especially the US, which is the largest hegemonic imperialist power the world has ever seen. The US has 1000 foreign military bases located in 146 countries around the world. Russia - even as the USSR -only ever had three.
BUT BACK TO PUTIN -
Putin does indeed call the collapse of the Soviet Union a huge catastrophe, but that is only because of the human misery it created.
In 2005, he said it was because the fall of the USSR meant: "Tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory. "
In 2021 he was more specific. According to the Reuters article you link to, Putin says the fall of the USSR was a disaster because "25 million Russian people in newly independent countries suddenly found themselves cut off from Russia, part of what he called "a major humanitarian tragedy".
What he is referring to, of course, are all the "Russian" populations like that of the Donbas, who moved to other parts fo the USSR and then woke up one morning to find that their Soviet passports were no longer valid; they were still Russians, but living in a country that was not Russia.
THAT WAS THE TRAGEDY.
As President of Russia, Putin sees it as his job to protect ALL Russians - including those that live outside the borders of what is now Russia, who became exiled through no fault of their own, who became "strangers in a strange land" because of the "catastrophe" that was the collapse of the USSR.
If you read the text below, you see the other reason that Putin sees the fall of the Soviet Union as a disaster: the economic RAPE of Russia and the accompanying fall in the standard of living, the rise in alcoholism, despair, the fall in life expectancy, the "mass poverty" that had been unknown under the USSR.
This is the actual text from Putin's speech in 2005:
"Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century. As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory. Moreover, the epidemic of disintegration infected Russia itself.
Individual savings were depreciated, and old ideals destroyed. Many institutions were disbanded or reformed carelessly. Terrorist intervention and the Khasavyurt capitulation that followed damaged the country's integrity. Oligarchic groups – possessing absolute control over information channels – served exclusively their own corporate interests. Mass poverty began to be seen as the norm. And all this was happening against the backdrop of a dramatic economic downturn, unstable finances, and the paralysis of the social sphere.
